A force of nature: “The Queen and the Smokehouse” at the 2026 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film5 min read
The Queen and the Smokehouse (2025) follows a culinary legend in a Polish Baltic resort town as she grapples with an upcoming season of work, and her own mortality.
“Here we have our pearl! We’ve arrived at Miecia’s Smokehouse, the Queen of Łeba. Here you’ll have the best fish in town” cries the local guide, shuttling tourists through the cacophony of Łeba’s fairgrounds to an unassuming shack behind a metal fence.
There, the indomitable Miecia is at the helm of her ship, commandeering the team, teasing her granddaughters, cracking jokes, and delivering endless orders of smoked salmon, herring, and mackerel to the never ending queue snaking down the block.
We first meet Miecia on a smoke break answering a call. “Hello, Sweet Lullabies Funeral Home here…sorry, it’s Miecia’s Smokehouse!” she cackles with a wicked grin. “In the low season we do cremations.” Tan and weathered as a veteran sea captain, with humor to match, Miecia is a boisterous woman, demanding of her staff, devoted to her craft, and seemingly unstoppable.
“They say people are not made of steel. But people are made of steel! I will work until I die.”
We don’t quite know Miecia’s age, but she’s been smoking fish for over 40 years, and those years are starting to add up.
Smoke itself is a main character of Iga Lis’ film, swirling around the Queen of Łeba from the smokehouse grounds, and the chapped lips of the chainsmoking crew. For Miecia, smoke keeps her going but is also the source of her suffocation; Eventually we learn that she has a lung condition that is “inoperable” and that every day at the smokehouse is slowly killing her. “I’m being smoked myself” she admits. And yet, she cannot imagine a life without the open fires, the fish, or without her cigarettes. She starts the day with a cigarette, puffs an inhaler, then lights another. A defiant recognition and acceptance of mortality, perhaps.
Defiance manifests itself in other ways, as Miecia struggles to juggle her love of family with the responsibility of the business. She is hesitant and skeptical to ask for help. We hear that her father was an alcoholic, which shaped her weariness of both men and drink. And we kind of see her point. Eager to attend her granddaughter’s birthday party, Miecia enlists the hapless staffer Pikolo to fill in for her one day. When he fails to show up after a bender, seemingly a common occurrence, she is irate. “It’s hard to trust men with responsibilities,” she complains to her daughter.
But eventually her daughter persuades her that Dawid, her son-in-law, can shoulder some of the burden. During a car ride, as he explains some of the changes he could make, she flashes her signature grin, but eventually we see that she acquiesces. A shiny new storefront is installed, a new seasonal crew hired, and Miecia finally decides to do something she’s never done before: take a break. At a local spa, between the water aerobics classes, salt chambers, and coughing fits, Miecia realizes she might have to slow down after all.
Despite these revelations, Dawid’s phone rings incessantly as Miecia checks in on how the team is managing without her, the fish inventory, and the customers. It is important to her that business is good.
Miecia loves counting her cash; loose bills stuffed in tea kettles, fat wads tucked away in her bra, stacks carefully counted on her coffee table. But the more we learn about Miecia, we see that cash is not the endgame. Miecia relishes being the beating heart of the smokehouse, the meeting place for locals and tourists alike, a source of pride for her community. At the start of the season, she rallies her seasonal staff. “Don’t make me money!” she cries. “Teach them how to eat fish, and the rest will follow.” The stacks of cash serve to reassure her role as Łeba royalty is secure. “What’s keeping me alive is feeling appreciated, having people to live for,” she admits.
Lis’ film, originally titled “Bałtyk” or “Baltic” in its Polish release, also captures the realities of seasonal work and life, and the communities that keep these small coastal towns alive during the months devoid of tourists. It also explores what it means to truly be of a place, in a time when lifestyles are increasingly transient. After all, how many of us could vie for the crown in our communities? The film’s main shortcoming is its English subtitles, which sadly fall short in conveying much of Miecia’s humor and the banter of the smokehouse crew. Some dialogue is missed altogether, rendering the personalities somewhat incomplete to non-Polish speakers.
Ultimately, The Queen and the Smokehouse is an ode to a special kind of female tenacity, a force to be praised and appreciated, but also feared. It is also an exploration of how love of one’s work can hijack identity. Should we admire Miecia’s dedication and passion or decry her dogged self-destruction? Is this an inspirational tale or a cautionary one? Or perhaps Miecia herself is a relic of a bygone era where craft, work, and life were one. Ultimately, the viewer comes away with a strong sense that that love, whether of people or craft, is inherently human, and therefore flawed. But we do end up rooting for Miecia to put her feet up more often. She’s earned it.
The Queen and the Smokehouse (2025) was screened as part of the 2026 goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film.
