Que Ma Volonté Soit Faite

Since the origins of myth—Eve, Pandora, the women accused of witchcraft—patriarchal culture has inscribed women into the equation with evil, sin, the perversion of desire, and punishment. In Que ma volonté soit faite, this ancestral archetype returns in a narrative and visceral form. Nawojka is condemned not for what she does, but for what she feels: her desire is punished because she is a woman, because it touches those threads of nature, desire, and power that society has long demonized.

The film turns this dynamic into a ritual—a dirty, visceral, disturbing rite—where guilt doesn’t need to be committed: it is enough to be a woman, to feel, to desire. Nawojka’s “possession” is not a metaphor but an existential condition: a genetic, familial, cultural imprint.

Just as Pandora opened her jar and released suffering upon the world, every tremor of life experienced by the protagonist—desire, attraction, longing—becomes charged with ancient guilt, even though she has done nothing wrong. The film strips away any illusion of innocence: sin is not an act, but a belonging; the female body is a site of suspicion, a sacrificial ground.

But the film is not only a rite of guilt: Que ma volonté soit faite is also—and above all—a journey toward liberation. Through the dissolution of certainties (family, community, social role), the film depicts the body as a battlefield and as the threshold of another existential state. Nawojka’s transformation—painful and terrifying—is both catharsis and challenge: her flesh betrays her, yet at the same time it asserts itself.

Sandra’s arrival, free and “different,” is a sign: a possible alternative, a reawakening of desire not as sin but as a movement toward the self. The women of the film—Nawojka and Sandra—become two facets of the same resistance: one at its beginning, the other already in motion.

When the film transcends realism to embrace the fantastic—trances, visions, possessions—it does not do so to sensationalize evil, but to expose its archetypal, universal, eternal nature. Evil is not an accident; it is a structure. And for that reason, the only possible salvation lies in interrupting its circularity: the body no longer as prison, but as the threshold of radical liberation.

In Kowalski’s staging, every image, every shot seems to seek matter that writhes—mud, skin, sweat, vulnerability—making the film concrete, frayed, raw. The choice of 16 mm film, the grainy photography, the chemistry of the image: everything contributes to making flesh, earth, shame, and transformation palpable.

Intertwined with the protagonists’ existential trajectory is the slow, sinister mass death of the livestock, contaminated by a milky substance—a pseudo-seminal, gelatinous fluid whose origin remains indecipherable. It is a liquid that seems to come from a symbolic, almost mythological elsewhere, as if the earth itself were expelling an excess of corrupted desire, repressed energy, or guilt accumulated over centuries. The dying cattle become a double of the female body: traversed by an ancient poison, judged without trial, sacrificed by a community that prefers to fear what it cannot understand. In this contaminated physical and moral landscape, violence is not an incident but a structural principle: emerging from bodies, from soil, from tradition, from the fear of the feminine as a source of chaos and disorder.

The stag-hunting scene thus takes on an even more threatening symbolic value: it is not merely a hunting act, but the staging of an attempted rape against Sandra, punished by the male community for being too free, too independent, too non-conforming. In that moment, the armed man is not pursuing game but the female body perceived as an anomaly; he is not aiming at prey, but at reestablishing patriarchal order. Nawojka’s intervention disrupts this predatory choreography, but not the logic of sacrifice: Sandra will become the true scapegoat, the one offered on the community’s altar to soothe its fears, as if eliminating her could silence all the dark forces threatening the established order.

In the wake of this imposed sacrifice, Nawojka confronts her own destiny through a self-sacrificial fire ritual, a tremendous and solemn act through which she tests her own possibility of salvation. She delivers herself to the flames as both offering and defiance, awaiting a sign not from men but from nature itself: the rain, if it chooses to fall, will declare her worthy of life. It is a moment that transcends symbol and spills into myth: in fire, condemnation; in rain, absolution. A cosmic suspension in which the female body is finally no longer a theater of guilt but of will—not an imposed sacrifice but a radical choice of rebirth.

When violence erupts—against animals, against bodies—it is never gratuitous: it is the logical consequence of a system that views women as a monolithic source of sin, to be subdued or sacrificed. And in the final ritual—which can be read as exorcism, damnation, or rebirth—the film suggests that a body consumed by delirium and the world’s repulsion may also become an act of will, an act of resistance.

Que ma volonté soit faite resonates among the foundational myths—Eve, Pandora, the witch, the condemned mother—but also among the bones of a present in which women are still suspected, relegated, demonized. Julia Kowalski forces the gaze upon a body that is no longer possession but an instrument of reclamation, accompanied by Daniel Kowalski’s disturbing yet immersive score.

The film advances an urgent mandate: to dismantle the idea of sin as a feminine inheritance, to reject the shame that arises not from actions but from identity. And in horror, nausea, and trance—to find the transformative event.