Cinema is not just hundreds of metres of film or gigabytes of material on a hard drive, it is something more. Each part of the technical process of capturing images serves as a building block of a larger message that the director wants to convey to us, and thus has its own meaning that we can attempt to decipher.

In his interviews, the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski often emphasises that cinema is a conversation. And he makes films to talk about different topics. In the director's early documentaries, such as Gadające głowy (1980), we can observe conversations about people, about who they are or what they feel, and in Siedem kobiet w różnym wieku (1978) we follow ballet dancers of different ages, which reflects the cycle of human life. Although he eventually moved from documentary to fiction, the conversations in the films stay the same: reflections and investigations of the depths of human nature.

Dekalog is a series of ten films. The cycle is united by a common title and idea. The films deal with universal, commonly known things - in the case of Dekalog, these are the Ten Commandments. There is a lot of literature about the decalogue and the Ten Commandments. But the director and screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz, with whom Kieślowski collaborated on this series, decided to interpret each of the commandments as a challenge for the protagonist and to understand whether it is actually possible for a modern person not to break any of the commandments. They created a cinematic observation of the behaviour of an individual in a complex, modern and new world through the prism of certain moral norms and ethical principles that have become the foundation of our civilization.

Interestingly, Piesiewicz is a lawyer by profession, and the practice of law is to some extent connected with a moral code. This experience in litigation played a key role in writing the script; the plot of the fifth part of the film was even based on a case that Piesiewicz had personally handled before. Thanks to this, Dekalog is endowed with incredibly detailed and reliable depictions of moral dilemmas.

The director wants to tell us that the decalogue is not a set of rules imposed in advance that we have to keep in mind all the time, but a natural set of moral principles that we decide to follow or not - in any case, we bear the consequences of these decisions every day. To see this, let's look at the first episode. It presents us with the confrontation between science and faith. The director introduces us to Krzysztof, who lives with his young son Pawel in Warsaw. Beginning with everyday scenes and conversations in the apartment, Kieślowski opens his metaphysical Dekalog in a rather brutal way through questions about life, death, the soul, and God posed by a child who sees a dog that has frozen to death in the street. The father, who is a university professor, explains to his son that death is a biological process. When the son asks about the soul, the father says that there is no soul. Later, we meet Pawel's aunt, who is the exact opposite of his father. While Krzysztof's authority is science and he trusts mathematical calculations, his sister Irena believes in God. We see that in his conversations with them, Pawel tries to find answers that would unite the two parties. His father and aunt have similar answers to the question of the meaning of life. You can see here that the director is trying to find out whether there can be a metaphysical connection between different people, to find areas where atheism and religion would not appear contradictory.

One of the main scenes takes place around a frozen lake. Krzysztof and his son use their computer to calculate the strength of the ice rink near their house. The calculations show that the ice is strong, and the father does not doubt them at all. The film deals not only with doubts about God in the religious sense or the need to believe in him, but also with trust in idols in the form of technology and the doubts that they actually offer any kind of answer. The film's climax begins when a glass vial breaks at Krzysztof's desk. The ink stain that appears as an omen not only spills as "blood" but also stains Krzysztof's hands. During his lectures at the university, the protagonist Krzysztof told his students about words, language and the metaphysics hidden in them - here the ink stains his hands, and he tries to wash them, which is known to be very difficult. It is as if he was symbolically trying to free himself from metaphysics. Later, in a conversation with his sister, when he feels that something has happened, he also says "it makes no sense" that he spilled the ink.

Kieślowski's Dekalog fits perfectly into the space of symbolism not only because it refers to the Bible, whose metaphorical plane is almost infinite, but above all because it shows a human being with his  weaknesses and fears that he constantly has to fight while overcoming the labyrinth of his own fate. If you watch these symbols closely, they actually give you a hint of what happened. We try to understand the meaning of the events at the same time as the character, but as viewers we have more clues at our fingertips. At some point, when Pawel doesn't return home for a long time, we realise that the broken glass bottle of ink is another omen - even something as strong as ice can simply crack. When Krzysztof finds out that the ice has cracked, at first he refuses to believe it, because science and mathematical calculations were his authority. The protagonist could only tell himself that nothing would happen, or ask for nothing to happen. But to whom was he supposed to speak? Here we witness his helplessness.

This tension - the feeling that something bad is going to happen, or has already happened - is largely due to the use of a deterministic philosophy in the film: the concept that the world doesn't just work on its own. Some things have already been set on a certain track, decided by God or something else. Sometimes the characters manage to change it, but it also depends on some kind of destiny, fate, or will that controls them from afar.

We may recall the introductory scene of the boy reflecting on the sense of computer technology as well as of life after he encounters the dog that froze to death. This is when he first starts asking his father existential questions and begins to feel the need for answers to these questions. He needs his father as an authority. And here we can draw a parallel: when the tragedy is confirmed, this is exactly what happens to the father - his enthusiasm and trust in the world of technology become almost empty after the loss of his child. The scene when Krzysztof returns home in despair and his room is flooded with green light from the monitor screen is very powerful. The father looks at the text on the monitor in disbelief: "I'm ready" (the computer is ready for new tasks). The machine, which was a powerful pillar of his worldview, does not feel his despair. He feels robbed and abandoned by this green light. 

Throughout the work, we observe a battle of faith and disbelief in which no one wins. He believed in science, but it was not enough. This is a film about the meaning of human life, a film about humility and about the fact that if we don't accept something and don't believe in it, we don't necessarily have to be right. The epilogue in this work is Krzysztof's destruction of the church altar at the end of the film, which establishes a certain balance. The wax from the candles rolls down in drops, and the image of the Virgin Mary in the frosty landscape shows tears of concern. In the scene where Krzysztof puts an icy block of holy water on his face, he is looking for relief. The director's narrative revolves around fire and cold, ice and tears - all of these are interconnected leitmotifs. During the script work on the cycle, another of the most famous leitmotifs of Dekalog was born - the presence of a mysterious man played by Artur Barciś. The creators of the film series decided that the series needed a figure that no one notices, but this figure is present in every episode. This character plays the role of an observer, a witness, a listener, and a passerby. Various religious interpretations were also ascribed to him. Of course, the director does not answer the question of who this character is. One can only say that this is one of the symbols of this cycle, with which the director is trying to tell us something.

In conclusion, it is impossible to tell a story without telling it through yourself. When making films, Kieślowski always directs the camera at himself, but he does it in such a way that no one notices. After all, the main task of a director as an artist is not to describe the world he sees, but to describe the world that is inside him. If Kieślowski had not asked himself the questions presented in the film, he would never have achieved such a mastery in presenting them to us in a cinematic form.