Social Capitalism

Investigative journalist Monika Sieradzka travelled with two Swedish documentary filmmakers, Fredrik von Krusenstjerna and Richard Solarz, to Poland’s second-biggest city to find out who was involved in the mysterious deaths of ambulance patients. No one wanted to talk. No one, that is, until a man named Jacek Tomalski was arrested for trying to murder his competitor, the apparently squeaky-clean funeral director Witold Skrzydlewski. As a result of these events and for a small fee, a colleague from the funeral world named Wlodec Sumera was willing to explain how bereavement works in Lodz. It turns out that ambulance personnel were bribed to get hold of more dead people. This strategy stopped working when the competition began to offer the same ambulance workers substantial sums of money. Slowly but surely, Sieradzka and the filmmakers get people talking, even managing to film in places that would normally be off-limits, like the prison.