A tear-jerker about a working-class girl raised by a high-minded professor to the level of a true bourgeois? Nothing of the sort. Pygmalion holds a more important and interesting message. It is a story of the conditioning we all have to go through to be able to participate in culture. Of the skills we have to acquire to deserve respect. Wojtek Ziemilski takes from Shaw’s Pygmalion the main trope and subverts it, building a performative event around it. It is not quite theatre, more of an attempt to bring the viewer into the situation of a meeting when we pass on not so much knowledge as emotional experience. The director explains: “It is an exercise in extreme empathy. We feel ourselves into someone else’s skin. Not the person but their way of functioning in the world, moving among others, building relationships.” Ziemilski’s Pygmalion is part of the series “We, The Bourgeois”. No wonder then that traces of Bildung can be detected here, as it is a concept absolutely central to the bourgeois idea of education as initiation into culture.