Mitja Okorn’s Boxer follows a young Polish boxer who leaves communist Poland with his wife to chase a professional career in England, and finds the West far less generous than the dream. A 150-minute Netflix sports drama built from the paths of many athletes rather than one.

Boxer (Bokser in the original Polish) is a sports drama directed by Mitja Okorn and released worldwide on Netflix on 11 September 2024. Eryk Kulm plays Jędrzej, an ambitious, hot-tempered boxer who, afraid of repeating his father’s mistakes, escapes communist Poland with his wife Kasia, played by Adrianna Chlebicka, to try his luck as a professional in England. Eryk Lubos completes the central trio as Czesiek, the uncle who backs the young man’s boxing career.

A fighter, a wife and a one-way crossing

The premise is deliberately classical. Jędrzej has the talent and the temper to become a champion, and a family history he wants to leave behind: his father Edwin is played by Michał Żurawski and his mother by Magdalena Walach. Together with Kasia he crosses to England, convinced that the West will offer him the professional career his own country cannot, and that the two of them will build a better future there.

That conviction does not survive long. In Netflix’s own synopsis, life in the West turns out to be no bed of roses, and each new obstacle wears down the couple’s youthful drive. After months of the ordinary hardships of emigrant life, Jędrzej swallows his pride and agrees to take part in a fixed fight, a decision that the story presents as the turning point of both their lives. The rest of the plot is best left to the film itself.

The timeline is wider than a single career. The story’s dates reach from 1955 to 1985, and it moves between Silesia, in southern Poland, and London. It is a period piece in the full sense: the production team had to recreate the Poland and the London of several decades ago, down to the look of the hero himself.

Not one true story, but a familiar route

Boxer is not the biography of any single fighter. Its characters are fictional, and the script reads as a composite of the many athletes from the Eastern Bloc who tried their luck beyond the Iron Curtain. That framing matters, because the route it dramatises is a documented one. Under communism, Polish boxing lived inside a state-run amateur system: a road to national titles and international tournaments, not to paid professional bouts. For a boxer who wanted a professional career, leaving was the only way.

The best-known real case is Dariusz Michalczewski. On 24 April 1988, while competing in West Germany with the Polish national team, he walked away from the squad and stayed. He turned professional in 1991 and, in 1994, won the WBO light-heavyweight title in Hamburg, the first of a long reign under the nickname Tiger. Boxer never mentions him, and its hero takes a different road, to England rather than Germany, but Michalczewski’s story shows that the film’s starting point is far from a screenwriter’s invention.

Mitja Okorn’s road to Boxer

Mitja Okorn was born in Kranj, Slovenia, in 1981 and has lived and worked in Poland since 2007, when the broadcaster TVN brought him in to direct the series 39 i pół. His Polish breakthrough came in 2011 with Letters to Santa (Listy do M.), an ensemble Christmas comedy that became the most watched film in Poland that year and stayed in cinemas for 130 days. He followed it with the romantic comedy Planet Single (2016), and then moved to the United States for Life in a Year, a romantic drama with Jaden Smith and Cara Delevingne shot in 2017 and released only in 2020.

Boxer is a change of register for him. After a decade of comedies and romances, it is his first sports film. Okorn wrote the screenplay with Lucas Coleman, who also directed the second unit, and Ivan Bezmarević. The director has described it as a bittersweet story about dreams and sacrifice, and insists that Kasia is as important as Jędrzej: a woman standing behind a man’s wild pursuit of success, who fights the battle of her life on a different ground.

The team behind the camera links the film to the Polish commercial cinema Okorn helped shape. The score is by Łukasz Targosz, the composer of Letters to Santa and Planet Single, whose soundtrack for the 2011 comedy went gold in Poland. Bartek Cierlica is the director of photography and Jan Belcl the editor. The producers are Maciej Kawulski and Tomasz Wardyn for Open Mind Production.

A producer from the fight business

Maciej Kawulski is not a conventional film producer. He co-founded KSW, the Polish mixed martial arts federation whose KSW 39 gala drew more than 56,000 people to Warsaw’s National Stadium in 2017, and in 2019 he directed Underdog, an MMA drama starring the fighter Mamed Khalidov and Eryk Lubos. He then directed the gangster diptych Jak zostałem gangsterem (2020) and How I Fell in Love with a Gangster (2022), the second for Netflix, and produced 365 Days (2020), which became a worldwide hit on Netflix. For Boxer, Kawulski has said, the goal was to make everything look as credible as possible, from the hero’s physique to the fights and the world in which he builds his career.

Eryk Kulm, Adrianna Chlebicka and Eryk Lubos

Eryk Kulm, born in Warsaw in 1990 and sometimes credited as Eryk Kulm Jr., arrived at Boxer as one of the most decorated actors of his generation: in 2023 he won the Polish Academy Award for Best Actor for the title role in Filip, a drama set in wartime Frankfurt. Before that he had appeared in Stones for the Rampart (2014) and Irena’s Vow (2023). For Jędrzej he spent more than six months in preparation, learning boxing technique and gaining muscle mass to build a credible professional fighter’s body.

Adrianna Chlebicka, credited as Ada Chlebicka, is best known in Poland for the series Kontrola and for the Netflix romantic comedy Love Squared (Miłość do kwadratu, 2021), in which she played the lead, and its 2023 sequel. In Boxer she has the role that Okorn himself presents as the second engine of the story.

Eryk Lubos is the veteran of the trio. Born in 1974 in Tarnowskie Góry, in the same Silesian region where the film was shot, he won the Zbigniew Cybulski Award in 2009 and the Best Actor prize at Karlovy Vary in 2012 for To Kill a Beaver. He has practised boxing himself for years, and Boxer is his second combat-sports film with Kawulski after Underdog. The supporting cast includes Adam Woronowicz as Nicky Presley, Waleria Gorobets, Jacek Poniedziałek and Bartłomiej Kotschedoff.

Made in Bytom, for a global platform

Filming took place in Bytom, in Silesia, in late 2023, and the city returned the favour: ahead of the premiere, Netflix promoted the film with a large mural on the façade of a Bytom tenement. Boxer was part of a heavy slate of Polish originals that the platform announced for the second half of 2024, alongside titles such as Colors of Evil: Red. With a running time of 150 minutes, it is also a long film by the standards of the genre, a choice that fits a story covering three decades.

Where it lands

On paper, Boxer stands on familiar sports-drama ground: the talent, the escape, the disappointment and the one fight that can change everything. Its interest lies in where it plants that ground, in a chapter of Polish history that cinema rarely visits, the years when an athlete’s ambition could only be fulfilled by crossing a border with no way back. Whether the familiar beats outweigh the specific setting is a question each viewer will answer for themselves; the context, the cast and the history behind it are reason enough to give it a look on Netflix.

Tags: Netflix, Poland