The Way Home

“The Way Home” – synopsis of feature film – author Ewa Stankiewicz
When you cannot find your way home…
Harold Sirs, a world renowned composer and headhunter, opens the door to a dream career for Mary: a student of the Music Conservatory in Lviv (Poland). He offers her a dream scholarship in New York City. She is to compose a piece that is going to be performed in one of the best concert halls in the world.
World War II is about to break out. Mary arrives in New York City with her one year old son. Nothing seems impossible to her - she can manage anything, she’ll find the time, even though she’s always late for everything.
Captivated by the world of New York music clubs, Mary composes a symphony. She mingles with New York music critics and journalists. She gets offered an opportunity to sign a contract with a renowned record label. One day, running late to a rehearsal, she gets hit by a car on 5th Avenue. After she gets released from hospital, while rehearsing with the orchestra again, she suddenly realises that she no longer is in New York City. Shocked, she finds herself on a theatre stage instead - a theatre in Poland, which is occupied by the Germans and the Soviets.

In her tiny New York apartment she finds herself ‘dreaming’ very realistic scenes of prisons and labour camps, of being exiled deep into Soviet Russia with her baby - all the while composing the same exact music piece as she’s working on in New York. Out the small broken window of the cattle train car she is being transported in - to the dismay of her old professor from the Conservatory, who happens to be among the prisoners - Mary throws letters with fragments of the composition, hoping that with the help of kind people along the way they will somehow be able to reach New York.
During the harrowing journey in the cattle car the symphony receives its final title - "The Way Home".

As the danger around her becomes more and more tangible, Mary struggles to “wake up” from the Soviet nightmare, even though she had accidentally figured out a way to do so previously: a tragic-comical move which allows her to “jump” between the two worlds.
Mary, determined to save her now 2-year old son, undertakes a risky escape attempt - back to her home, a country that no longer exists. Followed by a Soviet officer, a psychopath nicknamed "Biały'', who is trying to force her to compose a Kolkhoz opera, she persists relying on her cleverness, stubbornness and talent. In an old derelict inn, with her massacred right hand, she plays a song for an old smuggler - the heart warming piece ensures she gets the help she needs. Will she be able to save her and her child’s life? Will she manage to complete the symphony? Can the Soviet world - full of paradoxes, brutality and absurdity -really be real?
Mary begins to suspect she is late, again. Has she not managed to leave occupied Poland? Which road is real: the one leading through the Soviet hell, or the one to the top of a New York career?
20 years later - the war is long over, but Poland is still not free - remaining under occupation of the USSR. Mary is a poor immigrant-refugee in London. Anonymously, she shows up at the great Albert Hall, where Harold Sirs, Mary's former promoter, arrives in a limousine, awaited by fans and journalists. Sirs' pupil is about to conduct the world premiere of the symphony “The Way Home", whose true composer, Mary, has been declared as "missing". Among the crowd Mary spots a Soviet officer, “White” - her former persecutor, and now a USSR ambassador to London and one of the patrons of the concert...

"... Breathe, this may be only a small window of time, you have to remember it all and tell your son about it. Maybe through music, if you have enough hope ... ”, - those are the words that Mary’s mother spoke all those years before. Back then, it did not seem feasible that the freedom finally regained after 6 generations born in a land occupied by foreign invaders, would only last a short while. Too short to be able to truly live, and to follow your dreams.
If you can't find your way home ... maybe you might be able to hear it?