Kevin Wilson’s Thirtyframesasecond blog has just published an excellent piece on Ryszard Bugajski’s Interrogation (Przesłuchanie, 1982), probably the bluntest and most shocking indictment of the Stalinist era that anyone was able to make in Poland prior to 1989 – or indeed since, as Polish filmmakers have tended to shy away from the subject in recent years. (Second Run’s site has lots of background material including links to two fascinating PDF documents exploring the problems that the film encountered in Poland – where it was banned until 1990.)
In fact, a major problem that Polish filmmakers have encountered in the last decade and a half is that neither funders nor audiences are especially keen on reliving the past, especially if it involved Poles themselves behaving less than perfectly. To underline this, when I interviewed Bugajski recently I asked him what his current projects were, and he said he’s been trying to develop a film based on the story of the Kielce pogrom. Anti-Semitic pogroms were hardly rare events in 1940s Polish history, but this one was unusual in that it took place after the end of World War II (and the discovery of what happened in Auschwitz, on Polish soil), and was perpetrated by Poles.
Not too surprisingly, he’s been having a bit of difficulty raising funds – when I spoke to him, he was convinced that he’d never get it made, as no Polish organisation wanted to touch it with the proverbial barge-pole and international funding bodies weren’t interested either – but it now seems as though shooting will finally start at some point this year.