Netflix‘s adaptation of Znachor, Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz’s 1937 novel, puts Leszek Lichota in the role of a Warsaw surgeon who loses his memory and returns years later as a rural healer, in the third screen version of one of Poland’s best-loved melodramas.

Forgotten Love is a 2023 Polish period drama produced by Netflix, directed by Michał Gazda and adapted from Znachor, the 1937 novel by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz whose title translates as The Quack. It follows Professor Rafał Wilczur, the most celebrated surgeon in interwar Warsaw, who loses his wife, his daughter, his memory and finally his own name, and then spends years rebuilding a life as a village healer without knowing who he used to be. Leszek Lichota plays Wilczur, and Maria Kowalska plays Marysia, the daughter he no longer remembers.

The film is a 140-minute, Polish-language production written by Marcin Baczyński and Mariusz Kuczewski and produced by Magdalena Szwedkowicz. Before it reached the platform, it toured six Polish towns between September 20 and 25, 2023, with pre-premiere screenings in Toruń, Krasnystaw, Wałbrzych, Kalisz, Lidzbark Warmiński and Stargard. Netflix released it on September 27, 2023, simultaneously in 190 countries, which turned one of the best-known stories in Polish popular culture into a title that most of its new audience was meeting for the first time.

A surgeon who forgets his own name

The story opens with Wilczur at the height of his career. His professional life is a series of triumphs, but at home his wife, Beata (Małgorzata Mikołajczak), leaves him and takes their young daughter, Marysia, with her. In despair, he wanders the city, falls into the hands of thieves and is robbed and beaten so badly that the head injuries wipe out his memory. With no papers and no idea who he is, the famous professor is presumed dead, and the man who survives the attack has nothing left of him but a pair of skilled hands.

Fifteen years later he resurfaces in the countryside under the name Antoni Kosiba, a drifter who moves from one casual job to the next. He finds a roof at a village mill, which in this version is run by Zośka (Anna Szymańczyk), and gradually discovers that he can set bones and treat wounds better than anyone around him. The villagers start coming to him instead of the doctor, and he becomes what the novel’s title calls him: a znachor, a folk healer working without a licence, a role that carries its own risks once the local medical establishment notices.

Then Marysia, now a young woman, crosses his path. She seems strangely familiar to him, but he cannot say why, and she has no reason to connect the healer with the father she lost as a child. Her life has its own complication: young Count Leszek Czyński (Ignacy Liss) has fallen in love with her, and his aristocratic parents, Count Stanisław Czyński (Mikołaj Grabowski) and the Countess (Izabela Kuna), have other plans for their son.

From there the melodrama tightens several threads at once: a romance across class lines, an unlicensed healer who becomes a problem for the law, and a medical past that sooner or later has to come back into the light. Generations of Polish readers know how it ends. A large part of the Netflix audience did not, and the way those threads meet is best left to the film itself.

A novel that began as a rejected screenplay

Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz, born in 1900 in Głębokie, in what was then the Wilno governorate, was the most widely read Polish novelist of the interwar years, the author of the 1932 satire The Career of Nikodem Dyzma. Znachor was not originally conceived as a novel. He wrote it as a film script, and when the script was rejected he turned it into the book published in 1937. Two years later, in September 1939, the writer was killed in the town of Kuty while serving as a soldier in the defence of Poland.

The story had real-world seeds. In 1936, during a stay at a country estate, Dołęga-Mostowicz visited the village of Radotki, where a worker at the local water mill, a herbalist named Różycki, received patients who preferred him to expensive doctors. Shortly before, in 1935, the newspaper ABC, which the writer worked with, had reported on Ferdynand Dolani, a doctor trained in Brussels who was arrested for quackery in the village of Borek after hiding his medical diploma, because healers earned more than physicians. Radotki became the fictional Radoliszki, moved to the north-eastern borderlands where the author grew up.

The novel was successful enough to demand a sequel, Profesor Wilczur, published in 1939. Cinema followed the book almost at once: Michał Waszyński’s 1937 film, starring Kazimierz Junosza-Stępowski, was a box-office hit, produced two screen sequels and in 2026 was added to the Polish Film Heritage List. In 1981, Jerzy Hoffman filmed the story again with Jerzy Bińczycki, Anna Dymna and Tomasz Stockinger; released in April 1982, it drew around 5.7 million cinema admissions and became a fixture of Polish television. With Gazda’s version, Znachor became the first Polish novel to receive three film adaptations.

Leszek Lichota and a new generation of cast

Leszek Lichota is the third actor to play Wilczur, after Junosza-Stępowski and Bińczycki. Born in 1977 in Wałbrzych, one of the six towns that hosted the pre-premiere screenings, he graduated from the Theatre Academy in Warsaw in 2002 and spent four years at the Teatr Polski in Poznań. Television made him popular through Na Wspólnej, Prawo Agaty and above all Wataha (The Border), in which he played the border guard Wiktor Rebrow. On film he won a debut award at the Koszalin festival for Lincz and appeared in the war drama Karbala. He has said that he grew up with the story of Professor Wilczur.

Maria Kowalska, born in 1996 in Wadowice, graduated from the Łódź Film School in 2020. She made her screen debut in the TVN series Pod powierzchnią and played Agata Passent in the biographical series Osiecka; Forgotten Love was her first leading role in a feature film. Since 2024 she has played the title role in Matylda, a period series for the public broadcaster TVP. Ignacy Liss, born in 1998 in Tczew, had been one of the leads of the Netflix series Open Your Eyes, and in 2026 he won the best actor award at the Series Mania festival in Lille for the series Proud.

The supporting cast includes one notable change from the source. In the novel and in Hoffman’s film, the mill that shelters Kosiba belongs to a male miller, Prokop; Gazda’s film gives that place to Zośka, played by Anna Szymańczyk. Mirosław Haniszewski plays Jerzy Dobraniecki, a figure from Wilczur’s medical past, and Paweł Tomaszewski plays Baron Krzeszowski. There is also a bridge between versions: Artur Barciś, who plays the butler Józef here, was Wasylko, the miller’s crippled son whose operation makes Kosiba famous, in Hoffman’s 1981 film.

Behind the camera

Michał Gazda was born in 1972 in Łódź, studied cultural and film studies at the University of Łódź and directing at the University of Silesia in Katowice, and spent most of his career in television and advertising, with around 300 commercials to his name. He directed the first four episodes of Wataha, which earned him a nomination for the Polish Film Awards (the Eagles) in the television series category, shared with Kasia Adamik, as well as episodes of Druga szansa, Odwróceni and the period series Belle Epoque. Netflix presented Forgotten Love as his feature debut, and he described it as a chance to play with the archetype of Polish melodrama.

The cinematographer is Tomasz Augustynek, a long-time collaborator of Gazda, with production design by Joanna Macha, costumes by Małgorzata Zacharska and editing by Piotr Kmiecik. The score is by Paweł Lucewicz, a composer born in 1985 and a member of the European Film Academy, whose earlier credits include the series Pod powierzchnią, Stulecie Winnych and Szadź, while traditional songs from the Masovia region are performed on the soundtrack by the band Svahy. The production shot at the palaces of Falenty and Nieborów, in Liw, Świdnik and Zgierz, and in the open-air Museum of the Lublin Village.

The numbers show how far a local classic can travel. In its first week, Forgotten Love drew almost 12 million views, the second-highest figure for a non-English film on Netflix worldwide; in five weeks it reached 35 million views and 81 million hours, and it entered the top ten non-English films in 59 countries. The story it carries is old-fashioned by design: it trusts coincidence, decency and the slow return of the past. Some viewers will take that as comfort and others as naivety, and the book has been dividing readers along the same line since 1937.