Kryzsztof Kieslowski's Camera Buff (Amator, 1979)

This is a fairly simple story.  A man, on the birth of his first child buys a camera and discovers film-making.  He is reasonably well situated with a decent job in a small town in Poland during the communist era.  The local party boss discovers he has a camera and asks him as a consequence to film the local festivities.  From there he branches out into amateur documentary film making.  In short he becomes a camera fanatic who, as he says "shoots anything that moves."

This is where the wheels come off the cart.  His boss warns him of the consequences of some of his filming.  He is criticised for filming the working life of a dwarf and for photographing pigeons.  His wife feels neglected, but his films are gaining him a modicum of fame.  Finally one of his films gets shown on television and the subject matter leads to the firing of another official in his town, who is a friend of his. 

His wife leaves him, and we finally see him sleeping on the sofa of his apartment, and forgetting to put his empty milk bottles out for the milk man.  He is clearly not happy but he continues to film.  

I am not sure what to make of the film, frankly.  It gives one a feel for what life might have been like in 1970s Poland.  In a repressive Communist regime nothing happens without the approval of the apparatchiks.  A man seeks to   express himself in a way that comes from within and finds himself stifled by the confining limits of marriage, job, and the community.