Returns Policy
If you are unhappy with your purchase, you can return it to us within 14 days. More details
Film Description
A harrowing masterpiece of Eastern European cinema that served as a focus for the Solidarity movement in Poland and was named as their film of the year in 1982. A woman wakes up in prison after going out drinking. She doesn't know why she is there and is soon being tortured to confess to a crime she hasn't committed. On completion in 1982, the film was banned by the Polish government for being 'inflammatory and dangerous'.
A film as powerful as this needs a context to make it bearable. So, some facts: Bugajski’s film is based on actual accounts of the treatment of political prisoners dur... more >
A film as powerful as this needs a context to make it bearable. So, some facts: Bugajski’s film is based on actual accounts of the treatment of political prisoners during the Stalinist era in 1950s Poland. It was popular at underground showings, and thanks to a copy of the film being made on tape before it could be impounded, and this tape being copied, it is estimated that it was seen by over two million people in Poland despite not having an official release. In 1982 it was named ‘Film of the Year’ by Solidarity. None of this makes its scenes of torture and humiliation any easier to watch but knowing that it has served a purpose in documenting methods used by the Security Police against a nation’s citizens, and also in focusing energy against a repressive regime makes it a valuable document. Its filming history enhances this value. It could only be completed after friends of the director outside Poland clubbed together to buy him more film stock. Soon after completion, martial law was imposed in Poland and the reels of film were buried under tarpaulins and snow in the grounds of the film studio, only to be dug up when Bugajski realised he was not in imminent danger of arrest.
Any film documenting the systematic ‘rape of the human spirit’ in Michael Szporer’s phrase, and presented out of the immediate context that would have given it such a vital charge, is going to be a tough watch. For a long time it seems that Tonia’s exuberance and refusal to take the games played by her tormentors seriously will win through. Her laughter is often as unexpected as it is welcome, even when the film takes its gallows humour to the extreme. No amount of spirit can take relentless attack without being deadened though; Tonia may not be broken by the end, but she is certainly numbed. Krystyna Janda’s performance is a one-in-a-lifetime piece. As an innocent woman, she shows what heroes and martyrs are made of – sometimes something as insubstantial as belief in acting on a pleasurable whim can ensure your survival and provide the tyrannous apparatus of state with an action to which it has no answer.
Though nearly entirely filmed in the cells, offices, basements and corridors of some Orwellian ‘Ministry of Love’, it is disconcerting that such events take place in the blue-tinged perma-light. These are deeds that belong to darkness and shadow. It is a disjunction that also gives us one of the film’s main symbols to represent any system that would use such terror as the means to an end; windows looking directly out onto immediately adjacent brick walls.
< less
