Veteran Polish director Andrzej Wajda take on the Katyn Massacre, the 1940 execution in a few days (probably a world record in mass murder) of some 20,000 Polish officers captured during the previous year invasion of Eastern Poland by the Soviet Union (in complicity with Nazi Germany who had invaded the western part of Poland).
As the movie begins, the Polish officers are being transported in trains to the Soviet Union as prisoners. Meanwhile the Germans are also doing mischief in their controlled part of Poland, detaining the professors of Krakow University and sending them to concentration camps. After a brief interlude in World War II, the movie moves on to the post war. In new communist Poland, when one of the widows of the slain officers tries to inquire to authorities about his fate, she is told is better to kept quiet. The movie ends with a recreation of some of the executions.
Aimed primarily at a Polish audience, this is a well made film, with good production values, but also curiously (for lack of a better word and given the subject matter) bloodless (the most moving part of the film is a real Nazi newsreel that shows the mass graves being exhumed by the Germans for propaganda purposes). I think it could have benefited by being less restrained and more polemical. Still, a worthy and interesting film.
As the movie begins, the Polish officers are being transported in trains to the Soviet Union as prisoners. Meanwhile the Germans are also doing mischief in their controlled part of Poland, detaining the professors of Krakow University and sending them to concentration camps. After a brief interlude in World War II, the movie moves on to the post war. In new communist Poland, when one of the widows of the slain officers tries to inquire to authorities about his fate, she is told is better to kept quiet. The movie ends with a recreation of some of the executions.
Aimed primarily at a Polish audience, this is a well made film, with good production values, but also curiously (for lack of a better word and given the subject matter) bloodless (the most moving part of the film is a real Nazi newsreel that shows the mass graves being exhumed by the Germans for propaganda purposes). I think it could have benefited by being less restrained and more polemical. Still, a worthy and interesting film.