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★★★☆☆ Tales of incest are unlikely to be the easiest of sells, but director Filip Marczewski does an admirable job of handling said material in Shameless (Bez wstydu, 2012). An intense melodrama that screened last weekend as part of the 11th Polish Film Festival, it deftly handles its subject matter and explores the lead characters without vilifying them. Although it fumbles attempts to interweave sub-plots involving neo-Nazis and gypsy minorities, strong performances make it one to watch. We begin with the teenage Tadzik (Mateusz Kosiukiewicz) leaping from a moving train, catching the eye of local girl Irmina (Anna Próchniak).

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"Shameless" This year at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, a mini-trend emerged in the form of incest movies, with films that dealt, overtly or tacitly, with the taboo liberally dotting the programme. “Shameless” (“Bez Wstydu”), the debut feature from young Polish filmmaker Filip Marczewski, is, as the title suggests, certainly on the overt end of the spectrum as regards to putting an intra-sibling affair front and center of the story. But while there is much to admire, especially for a novice filmmaker, here the film would have benefitted from spending less time on the splashy, logline-grabbing brother/sister romance, and a little more on the supporting cast and subplots that actually turn out to be a great deal more intriguing. Tadzik (Mateusz Kościukiewicz) arrives home after a spell in college, interposing himself into the life of his emotionally unstable half-sister, Anka (Agnieszka Grochowska), with whom he has an unwholesome.