Kinoblog

Andrzej Wajda’s new film Katyń has a website – in Polish only, but the trailer is comprehensible enough. Go to ‘Kontakt/Dla prasy’ and select your preferred format.

This is pretty close to my most eagerly awaited film this year. Wadja’s in his early eighties now, but since he’s managed to muster the biggest budget ever given to a Polish film, he’s obviously fully in command of his logistical faculties, and the trailer’s shot of a Polish flag being abruptly ripped into red and white halves suggests he hasn’t lost his eye for an arresting image either.

The only thing that slightly concerns me is that this film is clearly so important both to Poland generally and Wajda in particular (his father was one of the Katyń victims, but the subject was completely taboo until the 1990s, as it was politically impossible to mention that the Russians were the perpetrators) that there’s a danger of playing safe and trying to be as balanced as possible at the expense of the drama – but Wajda’s not the kind of artist normally given to that sort of compromise, and in any case Katyń was presumably made with far greater artistic freedom than most of his output.

It’s premiering in Poland on 17 September (the date is not a coincidence – Wajda wants to highlight the fact that while everyone knows that the Nazis invaded on 1 September 1939, the USSR also invaded 17 days later), and hopefully will go international soon after. And although the last Wajda film to open in my native Britain was Korczak way back in 1990, hopefully the obvious importance of Katyń on historical grounds alone will help sway distributors. That, and the fact that the UK’s Polish population has massively increased since May 2004 – Wajda’s last feature was made two years earlier.