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Jornal da Mostra
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31ª Mostra > 15/02/2008
Text: Leon Cakoff, from Berlin, to ‘Jornal da Mostra’
MASTER WAJDA FINALLY MAKES ‘KATYN’
The 58th Berlin Festival allowed us a historical meeting with the always deranging cinema of resistance by Polish master Andrzej Wajda. The great master survived World War II and the Nazi terror, when his father disappeared forever, and, afterwards, to the soviet invasion and Stalinism that spread its tentacles over his devastated country. In Berlin, Wajda showed KATYN, in a special screening, a film that is born already as a classic and has international impulse also for being one of the five nominees for the best foreign film Oscar. In 2000 Andrzej Wajda received an honorary Oscar for his long career of remarkable films that claimed for humanism and freedom of expression.
Andrzej Wajda, 82 years old, only now achieved total freedom to express the pain of his Poland over one of the most terrible massacres perpetrated during World War II. “I had to wait for communism to collapse to reveal the truth”, said Wajda in his press conference in Berlin. The Soviets coldly planned the massacre of 22 thousand Polish officers, killed one by one with a shot in the head, in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk, in Russia. But till the end of their empire they made propaganda and brain washing to attribute responsibility for the genocide of a whole generation of Polish intellectuals and technicians to the Nazis.
“I make movies as I have always done for 50 years”, Wajda reacted to state that it is not a political film. “This is a first film about a taboo theme, but it is also about by memories. My father was one of the victims of the Katyn massacre and in my mind I have a lively memory of my mother, who never lost hope to see him come back from war. My mother and I used to read the list of names on the paper everyday, to see if my father’s was among them. What the Soviet secret service did was to destroy at once a whole generation of intellectuals, which undermined the creative and resistance potential of a nation. This has repeated itself many times throughout history. Poland suffers the consequences of these losses until today”.
The episode recalls that the plan to eliminate Polish intellectuals offered a unique opportunity to Nazis and Stalinists. On September, 1st, 1939, the German army occupied the east of Poland. Some weeks later it was the Red Army’s turn to invade the country, thanks to the Hitler-Stalin pact. Following act: the Red Army, with the friendly cynicism of protection, offers custody to all reserve officials, graduated military and intellectuals, only to deport them soon afterwards to the USSR.
“My grandfather was also executed in this war”, completed actress Maja Ostaszewska, who has plays the lead, in the role of the hopeful Anna, who desperately seeks for an official, her husband. Wajda reminds us that “not only the Polish were killed in Katyn. Soviet terror massacred an uncountable number of people at the same place, Ukrainians and many others, persecuted by the Stalinist terror, and they also need to have their stories revealed”.
Katyn massacre is a consequence of the pact between Hitler and Stalin, each side with their secret plans of world supremacy and domination. On the German side of the Polish invasion there was also an implacable massacre – against the older generation of intellectuals, University professors in Krakow, as it is shown in the film. “Cinema has always shown the cruelties of war, but it has only talked about the atrocities committed by the German. At least the Polish cinema school has always had this viewpoint. Who knows if now”, says Wajda, “this will also be a cinema lesson to open the path to more revelations”. And master Wajda adds: “This film completes my career. If I make a new film I might deal with a scourge of our times. I have been observing that over two million Polish have left the country to look for better opportunities abroad. This exodus may be a good plot for my next film”.
More Berlin Festival at http://www.berlinale.de
English version: Laura Rebessi