A story of a dropout out of a succesful career and a loving family. He goes to a local railroad station, then checks into a hotel and refuses to leave despite visits by a psychiatrist and his own son. He watches people daily at the station. A tv reporter is trying to come up with a story which would help him to save his job. He likes to chase women and the dropout's wife is one of his targets. He gets interested in the story of her husband and tries to make a program about mysterious individual. Once the tv crew arrives to the scene, the subject tries to hide and ends up on the roof of the station, where he catches a glimpse of sunshine - the "smaller sky" - before stepping onto a glass roof and falling to his death.
Kinga, a divorced woman raising her daughter Emilka, decides to change her professional life and start writing a book. Personal matters and problems with finding common ground with her child, however, throw her off balance.
Trace is an impressional story about the artistic practice of Alina Szapocznikow, recorded three years after the artist’s untimely death. Film director Helena Włodarczyk took the artist's sculptures hailing from various stages of her work to a metropolitan avenue. Even in highly urbanised surroundings, the works by Szapocznikow still seem imbued with the physical. An important role is played by formal experiments of the artist (e.g. sculptures of polyester). “I like to work with materials in which every touch leaves a trace. This physical contact with the matter gives me the sense of handing myself over to the sculpture”, as Szapocznikow explained. The title of the film refers to that very statement.
