xcx and the City: Pete Ohs on Erupcja

Whether in supporting parts or front and centre, 2026 would seem to be the year of Charli xcx becoming a film star. Since January, audiences have had the chance to see her on cinema screens in the graphic novel adaptation 100 Nights of Hero and playing ‘herself’ in the mockumentary The Moment. And while UK release dates for the movies are still to be confirmed, the 2026 festival circuit so far has already seen her pop up in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist and Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei’s Faces of Death. It’s funny, then, that the first released independent film in which the British singer-songwriter is fully in a leading role – without the meta trappings of The Moment – immediately pulls the rug for stans or just casual fans looking to get a sense of xcx’s acting chops: the opening stretch is entirely in Polish.

“All my films are some sort of genre experiment,” Pete Ohs, the director and co-writer of Erupcja, tells me, “and with this, part of the fun was that I was getting to make a Polish film.” Examples of Ohs’ other genre experiments include The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick (2025) and ghost story Jethica (2022). “My movies are full of a lot of inside jokes where, ideally, the audience feels like they’re part of it,” he continues. “One of the first [in-jokes] in this movie is that for the first four minutes, there’s no Charli xcx, and it seems like this is a Polish film. Doing the [opening] credits in Polish, having it start with a Polish song, was all part of that fun of being an American filmmaker getting to make a film that would be in the foreign film section at Blockbuster.”

Particularly prolific in the last few years, Ohs is a filmmaker who specialises in modest productions where the seed of a film idea doesn't start with a fully outlined story, but rather the opportunity to assemble a particular cast and crew. The finished film may be about a British tourist, Bethany (Charli xcx), and a Polish florist, Nel (Lena Góra), rekindling their strange and estranged relationship when the former gets both stuck in Warsaw for a few extra days and increasingly fatigued by her boyfriend Rob’s (Will Madden) romantic itinerary on holiday. But the project came from simply wanting to explore a story of coincidences in the Polish capital.

“The same week that I met Charli, I was hanging out with Jeremy O. Harris, who’s also one of the actors and collaborators on [Erupcja],” Ohs says. “We were at this bar with filmmaker Oliver Hermanus [The History of Sound]. I mentioned I was living in Warsaw and he then shared that he was once stuck in Warsaw for a month in 2010 because that volcano in Iceland had erupted. When I heard that, I thought about how I’d been living in Iceland in 2010. Those synchronicities felt exciting to use for a story. I didn’t know exactly how, I just liked the narrative kernel of somebody being stuck in Warsaw because of a volcano. That opens the door to the creative brainstorming process, and then we started to explore all the different metaphors that a volcano can be.”

Erupcja was filmed guerilla-style, effectively, during a lull in xcx’s ‘Brat Summer’ schedule, the timing of which also landed another cool casting coup. If we ignore one uncredited cameo, Erupcja features the first feature-film performance by Polish actor Agata Trzebuchowska since her debut leading role in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning Ida (2013). “The way my movies get made is through friends,” Ohs says. “It’s just who’s around and who are we excited to make something with. And Lena just said, ‘What if [my friend] Agata was in it?’ They liked the idea of getting to play girlfriends in a relationship. I was excited by that, but we still didn’t really even know what her part was going to be until halfway through the shoot. But that’s the fun of making stuff. I don’t really care what movie I’m making as long as it’s a movie. I’m fine for it to become some creepy horror, a quirky comedy or an international romance. They’re all worthwhile experiments for me.”

Expanding on his unique production process of “almost method writing,” where he and four of his actors (including xcx) are credited writers who determine their characters’ mindsets and choices on a day-to-day basis across the shoot, Ohs tells me that he’s been wanting filmmaking to feel more like musicmaking, more like a jam session. “The freedom and fluidity of how a song can come into existence is something I try to feel with filmmaking. And getting to hear Charli reflect on how my filmmaking process reminds her of her music-making process made me feel really good; it made me feel excited that I am getting closer to the way in which somebody can pick up a guitar, start to strum and a song can just come into existence. I want it to be that immediate, if possible.”

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Erupcja is released 5 June by Vertigo Releasing