‘Dear Dad, why aren’t you coming back?’ Katyn Andrzej Wajda 2007 - billboards featuring fragments of letters addressed to Polish officers killed by Stalin’s NKVD in the Katyn forest in 1940 are a part of a promotional campaign preceding the premiere of Andrzej Wajda’s film about one of the most tragic events in Polish history.
Michal Kubicki reports
Some 22 thousand Polish officers were taken prisoner by the Red Army when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in September 1939, 17 days after the Nazi attack on Poland. On orders from Stalin, the Poles were shot in the Katyn forest. The crime was revealed by the Nazis in 1943 but the Soviet Union blamed Hitler’s Germany for the massacre.
Andrzej Wajda’s film is not a historical account of the tragedy but draws psychological portraits of a group of mothers, wives and daughters of Polish officers. One of the most eagerly awaited Polish films in several decades, it is preceded by a nationwide campaign about Katyń and its place in Polish history. Krzysztof Dudek of the National Cultural Centre which organizes the campaign.
‘In this campaign we prepared billboards and special lessons on DVD which will be sent to schools. The most important point of the campaign will be the premiere of Andrzej Wajda’s film’.
Even though in 1990 the Soviet leader Gorbachev acknowledged Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre, Russia still claims it was a crime under civic jurisdiction and therefore no longer subject to prosecution.
‘We lost some time over the past 17 years in our educational process with our historical patriotic upbringing. Our society emerged from communist subjugation and from the communist system of education without any good examples. Our TV did not provide good education. There was not enough effort as far as producing documentary movies on modern history of Poland and Polish-Russian relations. All of a sudden, after 17 years we have another generation which is totally lost as far as historical education is concerned. We have plenty to do in this respect.’
In addition to billboards and educational materials for schools, an album entitled Katyn has just been brought out by the Proszynski Publishers. Iwona Pacholec is one of its editors.
‘Wajda’s film focuses on the lives of several characters – the victims of Katyn and their families. The album can serve as an introduction to the film, with remarks by the director and an outline of the historical background of the tragedy’.
Historian Janusz Cisek is looking forward to the premiere of Wajda’s film.
‘People don’t take education from books any more. It’s through the Internet and movie productions. You can see it judging Spielberg’s films about the Holocaust. It’s the best way of introducing historical education to modern society. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for this movie and am looking forward to the day of its introduction to our cinemas.’
Wajda’s Katyń will be premiered on September 17, an anniversary of the Soviet Union’s attack on Poland in 1939. It remains to be seen if the film proves an artistic success comparable to his most memorable features such as Ashes and Diamonds and Man of Iron.
Wajda Roars
22 February 2006
Andrzej Wajda, Poland's most famous film director, received a Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at this year's Berlinale film festival Feb. 15.
"Cinema is 100 years old, I have been making movies for 52 years," 80-year-old Wajda said prior to the grand gala and declared he intended to complete his latest project-a movie about the Katyn massacre-still this year. "I would still like to compete for a normal Golden Bear." Wajda's own father was murdered in Katyn.
"This is the movie I have been waiting to make the longest," Wajda said. "It could not go into production until Gorbachev brought to Poland and handed over to Lech Wałęsa documents [from Stalin-era secret Soviet archives] confirming that the Katyn massacre had been committed by the NKVD. Then I searched for literary material on which the film could be based. I never found it and so I went for an original screenplay."
Wajda adds the movie will not only deal with the massacre, but also the lie perpetuated for years after the war that the thousands of Polish officers had been gunned down in the Katyn Woods by the Nazis in 1941 and not the Soviets in 1940.
Wajda received the Golden Bear statuette from Dieter Kosslick, the director of Berlinale. Film critic Peter Cowie gave a brief speech about the laureate and Wajda received a standing ovation. During the ceremony, Berlinale viewers saw Pilate and Others, a movie Wajda made in 1972 for the German TV station ZDF. It was inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, which years later Polish readers chose as the most important work in Russian literature.
Asked why he chose the movie for the screening, Wajda explained he believed he owed something to it, as it had never opened in theaters or had been promoted in any way. In Poland, Pilate and Others was only shown for a few days, after which it was banned, apparently after an intervention by the then prime minister, Piotr Jaroszewicz. The movie supposedly offended religious sensibilities.
Born in Suwałki March 6, 1926, Wajda is regarded as one of the main creators of what is known as the Polish film school. In 1949, he enrolled at the direction department of the State Theater Academy in Łódź. He took the first steps on the directing path as an assistant to a veteran of Polish cinema, Aleksander Ford, in a few films they made together. As an independent director, Wajda debuted in 1953 with the movie A Generation. The picture receives a lot of criticism today from Wajda's opponents, who see it as an apology for the communist armed underground during World War II. The movie nonetheless opens Wajda's "war triptych," which won him international acclaim. The two other parts are Canal from 1956, a stirring recount of the final days of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (Special Jury Award at the Festival in Cannes) and Ashes and Diamonds, made two years later and portraying the lives of war heroes in the complicated reality of early postwar Poland (FIPRESCI Prize at the International Film Festival in Venice).
In the 1960s and 70s, Wajda made a sequence of film adaptations of prominent works in Polish literature. In 1965 he made The Ashes, a historical drama set in the Napoleonic era and based on the novel by Stefan Żeromski. The year 1972 brought The Wedding, an adaptation of the national play by Stanisław Wyspiański. Two years later came The Promised Land, a drama about early capitalism in the city of Łódź, based on the novel by Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont. Wajda revisited pearls of national literature in 1999 by filming Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania, a movie version of the most famous national epic poem by Adam Mickiewicz. Finally, 2002 brought The Revenge, an adaptation of the most popular comedic play by Aleksander Fredro.
In 1976, Wajda made Man of Marble, one of the most important movies about the postwar history of Poland, devoted to the tragic years of Stalinism. The film was awarded the FIPRESCI prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The sequel, Man of Iron (1981), dealt with the events of August '80 on the Polish Coast and the rise of Solidarity. It won Wajda the Palme d'Or in Cannes.
Wajda received a number of other prestigious awards at the most important film events. Holy Week won him the Berlin Silver Bear for artistic contributions. The Promised Land and The Maids of Wilko were nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Films. In San Sebastian, Wajda received the Silver Shell for The Wedding and FIPRESCI for Orchestra Conductor. He is a laureate of the French César for Danton. Wajda also won two Gold Medals at the International Film Festival in Moscow, for The Birch Wood in 1971 and The Promised Land in 1975, while Landscape After the Battle brought him a Golden Globe at the festival in Milan.
In 2000, Wajda received a lifetime achievement Oscar. Earlier, his legacy was acknowledged in 1990 with a Felix statuette from the European Film Awards, an honorary Golden Lion in Venice in 1998 and in 1999, a Crystal Iris at the International Film Festival in Brussels.
During a career spanning half a century, Wajda has launched a number of outstanding actors. Names inseparably connected with Wajda include such Polish movies stars as Zbigniew Cybulski (dubbed Poland's James Dean, he died tragically in 1967), Krystyna Janda, Daniel Olbrychski, Wojciech Pszoniak, Andrzej Seweryn and Beata Tyszkiewicz
