Andrzej Wajda's film Katyn will represent Poland at next year's Academy Awards. The film, which is the first to focus on the 1940 massacre of Polish officers by Soviet Secret Police, premiered last week, and has since become the most successful Polish film of the year.
Wajda's own father perished in the tragedy, and the film is largely a personal evocation of how families tried to uncover the truth amidst the competing propaganda of Germany and Russia.
Poland had been divided between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in September 1939, and sixteen thousand officers - many of them reserves who were lawyers, landowners, and even artists in civilian life - were taken prisoner by Stalin's forces.
In 1943, two years after the Germans had turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, mass graves were discovered in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. The Russians blamed the Germans and vice versa.
Wajda, now 81, has already won a 'Lifetime Achievement' award at the Oscars (2000). However, this new film, which is possibly his last, and certainly his most personal, may well come to be regarded as his best.
In the Soviet dominated Poland that emerged after the war, it was forbidden to mention the Katyn affair. Wajda waited sixty years to make his film. He has delivered a deeply affecting work that wracks the nerves all the way until the unavoidable finale in the forests of Katyn. The film does not slip into mawkish sentimentality, and even the closing credits are shown in utter silence. Mr Wajda deserves a solemn salute.
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