SBS Film Focus: Poland

At the beginning of Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn there are scenes of panic that reflect the very existential doubts that Poles have long felt besieged by: it is September 1939 and a stream of soldiers and refugees head east, over a bridge; heading west and effectively negating their movement are a second wave of retreating combatants and civilians. Those heading east are fleeing the invading forces of Nazi Germany; those heading west are fleeing the invading forces of the Soviet Union. There is nowhere to escape to.

Made in 2007, Katyn sums up one part of the Polish experience: to be ruled from afar, to be denied statehood. And as long as Poland has struggled to exist, whether it was achieving lasting statehood or surviving the brutal subjugation by the Germans and the subsequent decades of Soviet-inspired repression, the Polish cinema has struggled to not only survive and prosper, but reflect the national condition.

Movies were being made in what is now Poland one hundred years ago, before the country was reconstituted at the end of World War I, and by the 1920s it had a filmmaking industry and even an expatriate Hollywood star in the form of Pola Negri (born Barbara Apolonia Chałupiec), who would specialise in silent tragedies.

That phrase – “silent tragedies” – would ultimately apply to many in the country’s cinema. A generation of Polish filmmakers would face difficulties at home in 1960s and 1970s. Some, such as Roman Polanski, would leave the country after just one extraordinary feature (1962’s Knife in the Water), while the career of Wajda, a Herculean figure now 85-years-old, would be marked by periods of exile in sympathetic countries such as France.

A forthcoming season of Polish cinema on SBS on Tuesday nights in February – Katyn on February 7, Hope on February 14, Four Nights with Anna on February 21, and Tricks on February 28 – offers a contemporary take on life within Poland and how the country sees itself. The four films, all made in 2007 and 2008, offer links to the past and notes for the future, providing insight to a filmmaking culture only intermittently exposed to outside scrutiny.



Katyn is the one period piece, examining the ramifications of the invasion not just for those who died in mass atrocities such as the infamous mass execution of approximately 22,000 Poles by the Soviet secret police in 1940, but those who survived and the families of victims. The events at Katyn, which are chillingly recreated with methodical horror at the film’s end by Wajda (whose father, a cavalry officer, was killed there), were not officially acknowledged for decades.

How can you live, the film asks, when the truth is not even available to those who have died? In the movie it is the diary of one army officer, Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski), whose abrupt end reveals the date and occupier behind the massacre, but not even a fellow soldier who survived the actual purge, Jerzy (Andrzej Chyra), can live with the cover-up. Wajda’s tone is, unsurprisingly, sombre and demarcated by dread, documenting a world where the state will not even allow a monument to the dead to contradict their cover-up.

Stanislaw Mucha’s Hope is written by a key figure in the Polish cinema. Krzysztof Piesiewicz was a lawyer who defended opponents of the Communist regime during the 1970s. In 1982 he met the filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski and together they would write the works that made Kieslowski a revered figure in the international cinema before his untimely death in 1996: The Decalogue, The Double Life of Veronique and the magisterial Three Colours trilogy.

The story of a young man, Francis (Rafal Fudalej), who witnesses an art robbery and demands that the head thief, art dealer Benedict (Wojciech Pszoniak), recovers the work and returns it, Hope turns on notions familiar to Kieslowski’s work: the concepts of happenstance and fate, the carrying of guilt, a detachment from your own mistakes. The first scene, where an adult trying to safeguard a child dies, reverberates throughout the film, while a line from a security guard to Francis, urging him not become a lawyer, rings true: “Then you’d always be guilty,” he’s warned.

Four Nights with Anna (pictured) is the comeback of another key Polish filmmaker. Jerzy Skolimowski co-wrote Knife in the Water for Polanski, going on to direct numerous films internationally after being expelled from Poland in 1967 after his movie Hands Up was banned. After 1991’s 30 Door Key he concentrated on visual art and acting for almost two decades, but Four Nights with Anna was a return to his elliptical style, cutting together scenes to reveal the story a hospital worker, Leon (Artur Staranko) charged with repeatedly and secretly breaking into the room of a nurse, Anna (Kinga Preis).

With hints of a bleak Eastern European strain of surrealism, the movie draws on Skolimowski’s own influences – Hitchcock is referenced in the tense Bernard Hermann-like score, while there’s a nod to the final scene of Bresson’s Pickpocket – for a tale of thwarted sexual obsession that positions both Leon and Anna as victims. They’re connected as much by their actions (or lack of them) as their inability to communicate what they both know to each other.

Alternately blithe and melancholy, Tricks is the lightest in tone of the season’s nominations. Andrzej Jakimowski’s picture is about a small boy, Stefek (Damian Ul), in a tiny Polish town who comes to believe that a stranger (Tomasz Sapryk) who gets off his train at their local station during a brief stop each day is the father who abandoned him and his family. “As luck would have it, mum was down on hers,” is how his 17-year-old sister, Elka (Ewelina Walendziak) remembers the moment, and that melding of loss with playfulness persists in a film where deadpan exchanges are topped by polka bursts.

Told by his sister, who’s trying to find a way out of town herself, that he can influence fate, the precociously observant child tries to figure out how to steer the stranger into the presence of his mother (Iwona Fornalczyk). It is not, by any means, a children’s film, but the resolute self-belief of Stefek and his problem solving has echoes of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s wind-up universes captured in Amelie and Micmacs. The difference is the setting: a grimy, forgotten locale. It could be depressing, but given what the Polish cinema has had to deal with, it makes sense as a locale where the next era could unexpectedly begin, a ground zero for the new cinematic century.


Screening Schedule

Tuesday Feb 7, 9:30pm
Katyn (2007)
Dir: Andrzej Wajda

Tuesday Feb 14, 9:30pm
Hope (2007)
Dir: Stanislaw Mucha

Tuesday Feb 21, 9:30pm
Four Nights with Anna
Dir: Jerzy Skolimowski

Tuesday Feb 28, 9:30pm
Tricks (2007)
Dir: Andrzej Jakimowski