With the 2009 Cannes Film Festival in full force, it seemed appropriate to visit a master’s triumphant return to glory at the 2008 festival — one that, tragically, failed to find distribution here in North America.

Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski has always remained an outsider in international film circles. Starting with a series of startling, provocative films in Poland in the 1960s, Skolimowski settled in England in the 1970s, where he made arguably his three most famous works (Deep End, The Shout, and Moonlighting).

From the 1980s onward, however, Skolimowski drifted into cinematic limbo with a series of international co-productions (The Lightship, Torrents of Spring) that failed to find favour with audiences or critics.

It wasn’t until his recent re-emergence as an actor in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises that Skolimowski registered on cinephiles’ radar. Skolimowski, of course, couldn’t care less. He was happily living in California, painting and making the films he wanted to make — and making them on his own terms and his own time.

Which brings us to 2008’s Four Nights With Anna. The film’s genesis was a report Skolimowski read in a newspaper: “A man climbed into the bedroom of a woman he loved, just to watch her sleep.” This being a Skolimowski film, however, this scenario isn’t as simple as it appears.

Arthur Steranko stars as Leon Okrasa, an ex-con who works at a hospital crematorium in the Polish countryside while tending to his ill mother in his off hours. Years earlier, Okrasa was wrongfully convicted of the rape of a nurse, a crime he witnessed on the hospital grounds. The film is told in an elliptical manner, as we flashback and flash-forward to Okrasa’s current and previous life as he now serendipitously spies (and longs for) the same nurse he failed to help years earlier.

Okrasa is a constant onscreen as he breaks into the nurse’s room at night, tidying up her quarters, feeding her cat, painting her toenails. As the film unfolds, a creepy character study of a forgotten soul evolves into a deeper, more far-reaching meditation on love, loss, and the brutality of the relationship between the individual and the state.

The acting and directing are masterful. Steranko gives a heart-rending performance as a man who is destroyed at every turn by every means possible. Skolimowski’s refined but restless camerawork brings out the full, overwhelming poignancy and despair of the story. I strongly doubt a better-directed film was released in 2008.

Four Nights With Anna is a mysterious work that probes the depths of suffering to find the humanity that totalitarianism suffocates on an ongoing basis. It is a film that will be remembered 100 years from now. It’s so sad that it is now virtually forgotten one year later.