Katyń (film)
| Katyń | |
|---|---|
 Promotional movie poster for the film | |
| Directed by | Andrzej Wajda |
| Written by | Andrzej Mularczyk (novel) Andrzej Wajda Przemysław Nowakowski |
| Produced by | Michał Kwieciński |
| Starring | Maja Ostaszewska Artur Żmijewski Paweł Małaszyński |
| Cinematography | Paweł Edelman |
| Edited by | Milenia Fiedler Rafał Listopad |
| Music by | Krzysztof Penderecki |
| Distributed by | ITI Cinema |
Release dates | September 17, 2007 |
Running time | 115 min. |
| Country | Poland |
| Language | Polish |
| Budget | 15,000,000 PLN €4,000,000 |
Katyń is a 2007 Polish film about the 1940 Katyn massacre, directed by Academy Honorary Award winner Andrzej Wajda. It is based on the book novelization? Post Mortem: The Story of Katyn by Andrzej Mularczyk. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film for the 80th Academy Awards.[1]
Background
The Katyn massacre, also known as the zbrodnia katyńska ('Katyń crime'), was a mass execution of Polish POW officers and citizens ordered by the Soviet authorities in 1940. The most widely accepted estimate of the number of dead is about 22,000. The victims were murdered in the Katyn forest, Kalinin (Tver) and Kharkiv prisons, and elsewhere. About 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the Soviet 1939 invasion of Poland, the rest being Poles arrested for allegedly being "intelligence agents, gendarmes, spies, saboteurs, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, priests, and officials."
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Nazis used the massacre for propaganda purposes against the Soviets. However, after the war, when Poland fell under Soviet influence, the truth about the event was suppressed by the Soviet authorities, who maintained an official line throughout the Eastern Bloc that the massacre was committed by the Nazis. With the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, the first non-communist Polish government immediately acknowledged that the crime was committed by the Soviets. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre for the first time.[2] In 1991, Boris Yeltsin made public the documents which had authorised the massacre.[2]
There are now some cemeteries of Polish officers in the vicinity of the massacres, but many facts of the event remain undisclosed to this day and many graves of the Polish POWs east of the Bug River are either still unmarked or in a state of disrepair.
Plot summary
The events of Katyn are related through the eyes of the women; the mothers, wives and daughters of the victims executed on Stalin's orders by the NKVD in 1940.
Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski), a young Polish captain in an Uhlan (light cavalry) regiment who keeps a detailed diary. IN 1939, he is taken prisoner by the Soviet Army, which separates the officers from the enlisted men, who are allowed to return home, while the officers are held. His wife Anna (Maja Ostaszewska) and daughter Weronika, nicknamed "Nika" (Wiktoria Gąsiewska) find him shortly before he is deported to the USSR. Presented with an opportunity to escape, he refuses on the basis of his oath of loyalty to the Polish military.
The Nazi operation codenamed Sonderaktion Krakau, which involved shutdown of Jagiellonian University in Crakow and the deportation of professors to concentration camps is depicted in the movie. Father of Andrzej is one of the professors deported; later, his wife gets a message that he died in a camp in 1941.
In a prisoner of war camp, Andrzej is detained for awhile and continues to keep a diary. He carefully records the names of all his fellow officers who are removed from the camp, and the dates on which they are taken. During the winter, Andrzej is clearly suffering in the low temperature, and his colleague Jerzy (Andrzej Chyra) lends him an extra sweater. As it happens, the sweater has Jerzy's name written on it. Finally, it is Andrzej's turn to be taken from the camp, but Jerzy is left behind.
The film jumps to the post-WWII period back in Poland, when and where Andrzej's wife and daughter are still awaiting word about him. News of the Katyn massacre is reported, including the names of the victims, but Andrzej's name is not included in the list of victims, leading his wife and daughter hope that he was not among them. Jerzy, who has survived the war, has enlisted in the Peoples’ Army of Poland (LWP), which is now under control of the post-WWII communist government, but still feels personal loyalty to his friends, and like all Poles he loves his country and has sympathy for those who have suffered. He visits Anna and her daughter to tell them the news. Apparently, when the list of the names of the victims was compiled, Andrzej was misidentified as Jerzy on the basis of the name in the sweater that Jerzy had lent to Andrzej: it was Andrzej who was killed, not Jerzy.
The film presents the plight of Polish citizens in the aftermath of the War, who were faced with the choice, in the words of one of the characters, between the world of the living, trying to preserve as much of their Polishness as they can, even if it involves compromise and rejection by those who cannot accept the new order, and the world of the dead, the world of those who are principled and refusing to compromise.
Evidence of Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre is carefully concealed by the authorities, but a few daring people working with the effects of the victims finally deliver Andrzej's diary to his widow Anna. The diary clearly shows the date in 1940 when he must have been killed from the absence of entries on subsequent days. The date when the massacre happened is crucial in assigning the responsibility for it: if it happened in 1940, the USSR had military control of the territory where it happened, while by 1941 the Germans had control of it.
The film ends with a re-enactment of parts of the massacre, as several of the principal characters are shown being executed, along with other soldiers.
The film includes excerpts from German newsreels presenting the Katyn massacre as a Soviet crime, and excerpts from Soviet newsreels presenting the massacre as a German crime. Some documentary footage of the scene of the massacre is shown.
Production
Filming began on October 3, 2006, and ended on January 9, 2007. The film premiered on September 17, 2007, the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.
Marketing
The responsibility of the Soviets is suggested by the picture on the cover of the DVD[3], in which a red star appears next to the letter "K" in "KATYŃ", and on which the last letter "Ń" of the title "KATYŃ" is written backwards, causing it to resemble the Russian letter "И".
Cast
- Andrzej Chyra, as Jerzy – Porucznik (Lieutenant) in the 8th Uhlan Regiment
- Artur Żmijewski, as Andrzej – Rotmistrz (Captain) of 8th Uhlan Regiment
- Maja Ostaszewska, as Anna, wife of Andrzej
- Wiktoria Gąsiewska, as Weronika ("Nika"), daughter of Andrzej and Anna
- Władysław Kowalski, as father of Andrzej
- Maja Komorowska, as mother of Andrzej
- Jan Englert, as General
- Danuta Stenka, as Róża, wife of General
- Sergei Garmash, as Major Popov
- Agnieszka Kawiorska, as Ewa, daughter of General and Róża
- Stanisława Celińska, as Stasia – a servant in the General's house
- Paweł Małaszyński, as Piotr – an Air Force officer
- Magdalena Cielecka, as sister of Piotr
- Agnieszka Glińska, as sister of Piotr
- Anna Radwan, as Anna – a relative of Maja
- Antoni Pawlicki, as Tadeusz, son of Elżbieta
- Alicja Dąbrowska, as an actress
- Jakub Przebindowski, as priest Wikary
- Krzysztof Globisz, as a medical doctor
Controversy
There has been controversy over the politics surrounding the film. According to Wajda's production notes, the film was made under the honorary patronage of President Lech Kaczyński, a conservative politician. There was some controversy in Poland over how the then Polish authorities tried to use the film during election campaign.[4]
There have been accusations that the portrayal of Soviet characters is one dimensional.[5] however, in an attempt to nuance the difference between Soviets (political group) and Russians (ethnic group) the film presents one positive Soviet character, Major Popov. Meanwhile, Nazi German characters are also portrayed negatively.
In September 18, 2007 Rossiyskaya gazeta, the official newspaper of the Russian government, published a short comment by Alexander Sabov[6] claiming that the widely accepted version of the tragedy is based on a single dubious copy of a document related to the massacre and hence the evidence for the Soviet responsibility is unreliable. This prompted an immediate response from the Polish media; as a retort, the next day Gazeta Wyborcza, emphasized the formal admission by the Soviet Union of NKVD responsibility and republished documents to that effect.[7]
In April 2009, the authorities of the People's Republic of China banned the movie from being distributed in the country due to "its ideology being not in line with the official view of the Chinese state". However, pirate copies are widely available on the black market.[8]
See also
References
- ^ "80th Academy Awards Nominations Announced" (Press release). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 2008-01-22. Retrieved 2008-01-22.
{{cite press release}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ a b Applebaum, Anne (2008-02-14). "Katyn, A Movie That Matters". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2009-06-27.
- ^ Katyń at IMDb
- ^ http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,509645,00.html
- ^ http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/mar2008/berl-m05.shtml
- ^ Александр Сабов. Земля для Катыни. Комментарий. Rossiyskaya gazeta 206 (#4469), September 18, 2007.
- ^ Wojciechowski, Marcin. Niebieski ołówek Stalina. Gazeta Wyborcza, September 24, 2007.
- ^ "Katyń" Wajdy na indeksie w Chinach. Władze: Nie zgadza się z naszą ideologią gazeta.pl, 2009-04-28 (in Polish)
