Katyń (film)

Infobox Film
name = Katyń


image_size =
caption = Promotional movie poster for the film
director = Andrzej Wajda
producer = Michał Kwieciński
writer = Andrzej Mularczyk (novel)
Andrzej Wajda
Przemysław Nowakowski
narrator =
starring = Maja Ostaszewska
Artur Żmijewski
Paweł Małaszyński
music = Krzysztof Penderecki
cinematography = Paweł Edelman
editing = Milenia Fiedler
Rafał Listopad
distributor = ITI Cinema
released = September 17, 2007
runtime = 115 min.
country = Poland
language = Polish
budget = 15,000,000 PLN
€4,000,000
amg_id =
imdb_id = 0879843

"Katyń" is a 2007 Polish film about the Katyn massacre, directed by Academy Honorary Award winner Andrzej Wajda. It is based on the book "Post Mortem - the Story of Katyn" by Andrzej Mularczyk.

It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film for the 80th Academy Awards. [cite press release | title = 80th Academy Awards Nominations Announced | publisher = Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences | date = 2008-01-22 | url = http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/2008/08.01.22.html | accessdate = 2008-01-22]

Production

Filming began on October 3, 2006, and ended on January 9, 2007. The film premiered on September 17, 2007, the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. The movie is regarded by some as the most important and most awaited of Wajda's projects. [ [http://incentraleurope.radio.cz/ice/article/91521 Poland's Andrzej Wajda a guest at Cannes] ]

Background

The Katyn massacre, also known as the "zbrodnia katyńska" ('Katyń crime'), was a mass execution of Polish POW officers and citizens ordered by the Soviet authorities in 1940. The most widely accepted estimate of the dead is about 22,000. The victims were murdered in the Katyn forest, Kalinin (Tver) and Kharkiv prisons, and elsewhere. About 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the Soviet 1939 invasion of Poland, the rest being Poles arrested for allegedly being "intelligence agents, gendarmes, spies, saboteurs, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, priests, and officials."

For several decades the truth about the event was suppressed by the Soviet authorities, who maintained an official line throughout the Eastern Bloc that the massacre was committed by the Nazis. With the fall of communism in Poland in 1989 the truth of Katyn saw the public light of day, with the first non-communist Polish government immediately acknowledging that the crime was committed by the Soviets. In 1990, the USSR authorities admitted for the first time that the crime was committed by the Soviet NKVDFact|date=May 2008. Two years later Boris Yeltsin officially declared that it had happened by the order of Joseph Stalin himselfFact|date=May 2008.

There are now some cemeteries of Polish officers in the vicinity of the massacres, but many facts of the event remain undisclosed to this day and many graves of the Polish POWs east of the Bug River are either still unmarked or in a state of disrepair.

Plot

Katyn tells the story through the eyes of the women; the mothers, wives and daughters of the victims executed on Stalin's orders by the NKVD in 1940.

Cast

* Andrzej Chyra, as Jerzy – Porucznik (Captain) in the 8th Uhlans Regiment
* Artur Żmijewski, as Andrzej – Rotmistrz of 8th Uhlans Regiment
* Maja Ostaszewska, as Anna, wife of Andrzej
* Wiktoria Gąsiewska, as Weronika ("Nika"), daughter of Andrzej and Anna
* Władysław Kowalski, as father of Andrzej
* Maja Komorowska, as mother of Andrzej
* Jan Englert, as General
* Danuta Stenka, as Róża, wife of General
* Agnieszka Kawiorska, as Ewa, daughter of General and Róża
* Stanisława Celińska, as Stasia – a servant in the General's house
* Paweł Małaszyński, as Piotr – an Air Force officer
* Magdalena Cielecka, as sister of Piotr
* Agnieszka Glińska, as sister of Piotr
* Anna Radwan, as Anna – a relative of Maja
* Antoni Pawlicki, as Tadeusz, son of Elżbieta
* Alicja Dąbrowska, as an actress
* Jakub Przebindowski, as priest Wikary
* Krzysztof Globisz, as a medical doctor

Controversy over Russian response

In the September 18 2007, issue of "Rossiyskaya gazeta", the official newspaper of the Russian government, a short comment by Alexander Sabov was published [Александр Сабов. Земля для Катыни. Комментарий. "Rossiyskaya gazeta" 206 (#4469), September 18, 2007.] claiming that the widely accepted version of the tragedy is based on a single dubious copy of a document related to the massacre and that hence evidence of the Soviet responsibility for it is unreliable. This prompted an immediate response by the Polish media; as a retort, the next day "Gazeta Wyborcza", the largest Polish newspaper, emphasized the formal admission by the Soviet Union of NKVD responsibility and republished documents to that effect. [Wojciechowski, Marcin. [http://www.gazetawyborcza.pl/1,76842,4511792.html Niebieski ołówek Stalina] . "Gazeta Wyborcza", September 24, 2007.]

ee also

*Katyn massacre

References

External links

* [http://katyn.netino.pl/ Official website]
* [http://katyn.filmweb.pl/ Filmweb]
*
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUhBB3FgslI The movie trailer (YouTube)]
* [http://warinfilm.com/?p=14 Mini Review on Warinfilm.com]