Katyn

From Friday 3rd to Thursday 9th July | book tickets

2hrs 2. Poland 2007. Directed by Andrzej Wajda. With Artur Zmijewski, Maja Ostaszewska, Andrzej Chyra, Danuta Stenka. In Polish with English subtitles.

Wajda returns to the WWII period of his early trilogy to explore one of the major war crimes to affect Poland. In the spring of 1940 some 15,000 to 20,000 Polish officers were executed by Stalin’s secret police, among them Wajda’s own father. Working from a novel by Andrzej Mularczyk, letters and diaries by many of the victims and reportedly details from his own family's struggle, Wajda, who co-wrote the script with Mularczyk, tells the fictional stories of four families, who are separated from one another in late 1939. The film is built around shifting view points as mothers and children wait in hope for the men’s return. Wajda masterfully creates atmosphere and characters using sparse dialogue and expertly rendered visual brushstrokes. Aided by a magnificent score by Krzysztof Penderecki, precision editing which shifts the film through its extended time periods, and strong but restrained performances, Katyn is a superb work from one of Poland’s greatest directors. The film was nominated for an Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film in 2008.