director Andrzej Wajda
screenplay (based on the themes of the novel ‘Post Mortem’ [Post mortem] by Andrzej Mularczyk) Andrzej Wajda, Władysław Pasikowski, Przemysław Nowakowski
director of photography Paweł Edelman
music Krzysztof Penderecki
with Andrzej Chyra, Maja Ostaszewska, Artur Żmijewski, Danuta Stenka, Jan Englert
awards
Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, 2008
Eagle, Polish Film Award for Best Film, Best Cinematography, Best Music, Best Art Direction (Magdalena Dipont), Best Costume (Magdalena Biedrzycka, Andrzej Szenajch), Best Score (Jacek Hamela), Best Supporting Actress (Danuta Stenka), 2008
Audience Award at the Washington International Film Festival, 2008
Diamond Ticket, award of the Polish Cinemas Association, 2007
ANDRZEJ WAJDA, DIRECTOR’S ADDRESS [PRZESŁANIE REŻYSERA], 2007
[It is] a film about individual suffering which evokes images of much greater emotional capacity than historical facts. A film revealing agonisingly the cruel truth whose heroes are not the murdered officers but women waiting for their return every day, every hour, going through an inhuman precariousness. Faithful and unshaken, certain that it is enough to open the door to see in it the long-awaited man, because the Katyń tragedy is about those who are alive, those who were alive then.
RAFAŁ MARSZAŁEK, POLISH FILM AND STALINISM [FILM POLSKI I STALINIZM], ‘ISTORIK I KHUDOZHNIK’, 2008, NO. 10
Guided by his artistic intuition, Wajda takes a long time, up to the extraordinary final, to build up his film outside the realm of naturalistic images of terror and oppression. (…) There is no opposition: ‘we Poles’ – ‘hostile Russians’. It does not appear even in the horrifying, realistic epilogue. The sequence of execution is as shocking as an anonymous picture of extermination. The close-ups register successive figures and faces of the murdered prisoners. The oppressors keep in the background all the time. Their faces cannot be seen, their feelings will never be known. They are nameless functionaries of the system. The humanistic perspective of ‘Katyń’ is built by the sequence of help offered to the wife of a Polish captain of cavalry by a Russian officer. (…) He is unable to avert the course of history, so he does what at that fateful hour is dictated by his conscience. Apart from a moral spark nothing else is left in his life anymore. That spark, so transient that almost imperceptible, lies hidden like a minute diamond under a heap of ashes. On has to bow low to recover it. Wajda tells us it is worth the effort.
history periods
