Camera Buff

Camera Buff follows Filip Mosz, a supply clerk at an industrial plant in a small town near Kraków. When his first child is born, he buys an 8mm amateur film camera. It is the first camera in town, and word of the purchase quickly spreads through his workplace. The plant's director asks him to make a film for the enterprise's fifth anniversary, and the local Party official takes him on as the plant's unofficial photographer.

Filip's horizons broaden as his early works are shown at regional film festivals, and the camera becomes a way of examining the world around him: factories, workers, towns, remembered places and the relations of power and labour he encounters. The more new subjects he finds, the more his private and social lives become unsettled. His immersion in filmmaking strains his marriage to Irka, worsens his standing with his superiors, and raises difficult questions about how far an artist should go in showing the reality he sees.

Krzysztof Kieślowski directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Jerzy Stuhr, who plays Filip; the 1979 Polish production runs 112 minutes. It is the first of the thirteen films Kieślowski directed in chronological order, followed by No End. It holds a 7.8 rating on IMDb from about 9,100 votes, a 7.5 on TMDB from roughly 200 votes, and a 7.2 from ten critics' reviews.