The cast of The Altar Boys (2025): four unknown leads, one of them now up for Poland's Discovery of the Year
Piotr Domalewski built a Golden Lions winner on four boys with almost no credits between them. Here is who they are, who the adults around them are, and what the awards season made of the lot.
Four leads, one professional acting debut among them, and a film that walked off with the top prize at Gdynia. The nominations that followed singled out exactly one of the four.
Ministranci is built almost entirely on its quartet. Piotr Domalewski wrote and directed it, shot it with Piotr Sobociński Jr, and put the whole 110 minutes on the shoulders of teenagers, with the adult cast working the edges of the frame.
The four
- Tobiasz Wajda as Filip Grabowski — the ringleader, and the one the film tracks as he slides from redistributing money to deciding who deserves it. Born in 2010. This was his professional debut.
- Bruno Błach-Baar as Gustaw, known as Gucci — the second of the group.
- Mikołaj Juszczyk as Kurczak — "Chicken".
- Filip Juszczyk as Mały Kurczak — "Little Chicken", and Mikołaj's actual brother.
Domalewski cast a real pair of brothers as a pair of brothers and then gave them nicknames that only work as a set. It saves the film about twenty minutes of exposition.
Tobiasz Wajda and the Discovery of the Year race
Wajda came out of the film with the biggest lift of the four. He is the son of the actress Katarzyna Wajda and the great-grandson of Leszek Wajda, with two brothers, Tadeusz and Wawrzyniec, and The Altar Boys was his first professional job.
It brought him the Rising Star award at the Off Camera International Festival of Independent Cinema, a Pulsary nomination for best acting debut, and a nomination for Discovery of the Year at the 2026 Polish Film Awards.
He did not win that last one. The award went to Emi Buchwald for directing No Ghosts on Good Street at the ceremony on 9 March 2026, in a field that also included Filip Wiłkomirski for acting in Brother, Iga Lis for directing Bałtyk and Kordian Kądziela for LARP: Love, Trolls and Other Quests. Three of the five nominees were directors, which is the category's habit and not much help to a fifteen-year-old actor.
The adults
The grown-up cast is where the recognisable Polish names sit:
- Sławomir Orzechowski — nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 2026 Polish Film Awards, the film's only acting nomination.
- Tomasz Schuchardt — one of the more reliable presences in Polish cinema over the past decade.
- Kamila Urzędowska — best known internationally as Jagna in the painted animation The Peasants.
- Daria Kalinchuk — credited among the principal cast in the Gdynia festival listing.
What the ensemble actually does
Cineuropa's review in November 2025 singled out the group dynamic rather than any single performance, describing the film as a portrait of friendship and coming of age that zigzags through moral complexity without sentimentality. That is the right read: the film only works because the four of them behave like boys who have known each other since primary school, and none of them plays the material as a morality lesson.
The film took nine nominations at the 2026 Polish Film Awards and converted Best Screenplay and the Audience Award. Neither of those is an acting prize — which, for a film whose entire engine is four untested teenagers, is a slightly odd final scoreline.
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