Andrzej Żuławski was two years and eighty percent into an ambitious, delirious science-fiction epic when the government shut his production down.

The Communist authorities in Poland ordered sets and costumes burned, footage seized, and banned him from making films in his own country. He fled to France. The film was gone. So it seemed.

In fact, some reels did survive, and a decade later, Żuławski was finally allowed home to finish ON THE SILVER GLOBE (1988).

Unable to reshoot what had been destroyed, he filmed the streets of modern Warsaw. Ordinary crowds and grey buildings, his own voice calmly describing the scenes the state had burned. The film keeps breaking off from its cosmic vision to show you a living city while a man tells you what should have been.

When the scarred, unfinished thing finally screened at Cannes in 1988, it got a standing ovation.

It is not an easy watch, exhausting and overwhelming and at times impossible to follow. But it's a miracle nonetheless.