About Absolute Beginners
Absolute Beginners (Polish title Absolutni debiutanci) is a six-part Polish coming-of-age series released on Netflix in October 2023. It follows Lena, an aspiring young filmmaker, and her closest friend Niko, who travel together to the Polish seaside one summer to shoot the short admissions film they hope will win them a place at film school. What begins as a creative project and an easy, lifelong friendship slowly turns into something more complicated once a third person enters the picture and unsettled feelings rise to the surface.
That third person is Igor, a confident young athlete the pair meet near a sports camp by the coast. As the days stretch out in long, sunlit afternoons of filming, swimming, and talking, the closeness between the three teenagers shifts in ways none of them fully expected. Lena and Niko, who thought they understood each other completely, find their bond tested as first attraction, jealousy, and the awkward honesty of growing up pull them in new directions. The series treats these first relationships and questions of identity with warmth and a light, tasteful touch.
Anchored by a cast of young Polish screen actors, the show captures the heady, in-between feeling of a last summer before adulthood, when everything seems possible and nothing is yet decided. Lena, written as a sharp and observant teenager on the autism spectrum, sees the world through the frame of her camera, and the film she and Niko are making becomes a mirror for the feelings they cannot quite say out loud. Restrained and affectionate rather than sensational, Absolute Beginners was received as one of Netflix's gentler Polish youth dramas, a small story about friendship, art, and the courage of admitting what you want.
