Katyń

Katyń is by far the most powerful film I’ve seen this year. When the film ended, the entire audience shuffled out in silence. It would have been bizarre if the weather had been anything but cold and grey outside.

Katyń followed the lives of several interconnected characters in Poland during WWII and ended with a horrifying and blunt recreation of the mass murder of 15,000 Polish officers in the Katyń woods in 1940. The Polish director Wajda’s father was among those killed at Katyń and that must be the key to the emotional depth of this film.

In the opening scene of the film, a stream of Polish refugees are stuck on a bridge, not knowing which side to cross to. They are trying to flee from the Germans, who are approaching from behind, but are also being told that the Soviet’s are encroaching from the other side of the river. The whole film explores the tug-of-war done with the Polish people during WWII even in who was to blame for the Katyń murders.

Katyń was beautifully shot with vivid characters and eerily beautiful relationships. By placing the murders at the very end of the film, the audience is so emotionally involved with the stories of each officer and his family that even just staring at the floor and listening to the gun shots and the thud of bodies haunted me into chilled silence for several hours.