Assaf Gruber’s Miraculous Accident (2025) is a cinematic essay that narrates the love between Nadir, a Moroccan who has been invited to study filmmaking in Łódź as part of the Socialist Bloc’s support for anti-imperialism, and Edyta, his Jewish film-editing teacher. It takes as its backdrop the tumult and tragedy of 1968, when a diplomatic rift between the Bloc states and Israel resulted in the forcible expulsion from Poland of around 15,000 Polish Jews, many of whom had remained in Europe after the Holocaust because of their opposition to Zionism. When Nadir, played by the poet and filmmaker Abdelkader Lagtaâ, is notified of a letter written to him by Edyta from Haifa in 1989, he returns to the Łódź Film School – and brings the story of his love affair into the present tense. Weaving together original footage and extracts of films shot in the 1960s by Lagtaâ and his peers, Gruber’s work observes how the political intervenes upon life’s unlikeliest personal encounters. (Joanna Warsza)