Poland, 2026. Criminals are punished with automation, that is, they are given a collar that injects a drug called Vaxina into their neck which deprives them of memory, makes them insensitive to pain and essentially transforms them into automatons ready to be exploited to carry out menial and repetitive work or for more sinister purposes.

2028. As a gesture of rebellion against this system, the activist Szymon (Michal Krzywicki, also director of the film) has announced that on New Year's Eve he will commit suicide live; however, shortly before carrying out the gesture he will find an automaton without a collar in the Blue garbage (Dagmara Brodziak also co-author of the screenplay and creative producer of the film). The only hope for the girl is to somehow reach nearby and free Sweden.

Dystopias have often been the means through which to narrate the present in disguise, perhaps also to escape the traps of censorship.

It would therefore be all too easy to see in 2028 – The girl found in the garbage a metaphor for the political drift of today's Poland led by a reactionary, xenophobic right-wing government and racist who is progressively attacking every freedom and civil right.

However, such an obvious interpretation would be extremely reductive for framing the film.

Dystopian science fiction represents little more than a starting point for the Krzywicki/Brodziak couple.

This choice is partly a consequence of the budget of just 150 thousand euros with which the film was made which, also for this reason, appears deeply rooted in reality.

Krzywicki and Brodziak, especially in the first part of the film, skilfully describe with just a few touches a reality completely devoid of humanity.

Their Poland is a rain-beaten country, immersed in the anonymous gray of the few interiors that can be seen, starting from Szymon's squalid apartment.

In this scenario the automatons, in addition to carrying out humble and repetitive jobs, are obviously used as a valve to vent their frustrations, in some cases even as substitutes for lost affections or, in the saddest and most squalid cases, like prostitutes as in the case of Blue.

This suffocating reality finds its counterpart in the second part of the film, when Blue and Szymon's journey towards the longed-for freedom begins.<1 >

The squalid urban landscape is replaced by that of the countryside, the scenario in which almost the entire adventure of the two protagonists takes place and in which it is also possible to trace the last glimmers of humanity, starting with the couple of farmers who help the two fugitives .

2028 – The girl found in the garbage soon takes on the contours of a picaresque road movie made up of small and large adventures and nocturnal raves; an adventure capable of even being colored with comic and surreal elements, first of all the relationship that Blue forms with a rooster.

We know little or nothing about the two protagonists, in particular about Blue, a practically silent character of whom we are unaware the past and the crime.

Of Szymon we instead have brief flashbacks of some mysterious political action which, evidently, ended in the worst possible way.

Precisely these flashbacks are the least success of the film and end up being more than anything confused, especially because some of the characters present in them also return to the present without us fully understanding what role they have, what they represent and above all what happened.

Only towards at the end we are given some more information about Szymon's past when the two take refuge in the house of the boy's father.

A brief parenthesis before an ending by the sea that on the one hand inevitably recalls Truffaut's The 400 Blows, on the other hand it equally clearly recalls the shipwrecks of emigrants in our Mediterranean.

Also in this case the dream of a different life and freedom is close at hand, it almost seems like you can touch it, you can almost see it beyond that icy sea and those waves ready to swallow you and even if you know that it will be impossible to get there you can't help but hope that Szymon and Blue somehow they can do it.

EMILIANO BAGLIO