I remember the first time I heard about Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi. Friends of mine in Seattle were attendees at the annual Seattle International Film Festival and saw one of his films there in the early 1980s and raved about it. They became fans after that and tried to see everything he did that received distribution in their city. Unfortunately, outside of film festivals, few of his movies enjoyed wide (or any) distribution in the U.S. with the exception of a few art house dates in major cities like New York and Chicago. The first and only Zanussi film I saw was The Catamount Killing, which was released in 1974, but I only caught up with it on VHS in the mid-eighties. It is that rare anomaly in his career – a low-budget crime drama filmed in Burlington, Vermont with an English-speaking cast – and was not a success or even characteristic of his work with the possible exception of one of its themes – guilt and how it can destroy relationships. Only recently I have discovered some streaming sources for Zanussi’s work and my first foray into his past filmography is the 1980 made-for-Polish television satire Kontrakt (English title: The Contract), which was filmed in and around Warsaw and features an international cast of Polish, English and French actors including Leslie Caron in a key role.