The main information we get out of this section of the film is that Dariusz and other political prisoners have decided to start a hunger strike. He does this against the advice of his lawyer Labrador, who spend the opening scene in this section detailing his legal strategy — one designed around getting the case thrown out by technicalities and a lack of evidence, not confronting the core political issues.

This leads to a scene where Labrador visits Ula to see if she can decipher some of her husband’s hand written notes. She doesn’t have great luck doing so. They discuss his legal strategy a bit — he seemed to focus more on making ethical and emotional appeals to the judges, not relying on the facts of the case. Labrador praised him while saying he takes a completely different legal strategy that focuses on the head, not the heart.

At one point he asks Ula if she misses her late husband — a question which probably shouldn’t have to be asked, and she replies yes. But the movie isn’t focused on her grief at all, it seems far more interested on the mechanics of this legal case … and the masterful way Kieslowski handles grief in later films is nowhere to be found here.

There’s one final set of scenes in this segment — Ula goes back to the apartment of Dariusz’s wife Joanna, where another discussion about political prisoners is underway. Ula doesn’t seem to be participating, just staying on the periphery of the conversation.

But then a woman enters who knew her husband Antek and launches into a story about how she met him at some summer camp when they were children. It’s a very weird little scene, because the woman not only didn’t know that Antek is dead, she didn’t offer any condolences or words of concern to his widow for something that only happened a month ago.

We never get to the end of the story, because Joanna returns from a conversation at the door to announce that Dariusz has gone on a hunger strike.

Believe it or not, all of this took up about 10 minutes of screen time. The film is moving at a snail’s pace at this point and there are a whole lot more pointless legal maneuverings to go.