Film review: Katyn

Published on Thursday 2 July 2009 18:57

KATYN (15) **** Directed by: Andrzej Wajda STARRING: ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI, SERGEI GARMASH, MAJA OSTASZEWSKA, ANDRZEJ CHYRA

VETERAN 82-year-old Polish director Andrzej Wajda delivers a stinging, deeply felt, intensely personal film here about one of the worst atrocities of the Second World War – the execution of between 12,000 and 20,000 Polish officers at the titular forest on the outskirts of Krakow in 1940.

The victims – who included Wajda's father – constituted the equivalent of the Polish bourgeoisie, and their elimination was part of a social engineering plan devised by Stalin to transform occupied Poland into a communist state, free from dissenters.

This state-sponsored genocide was subsequently blamed on the Nazis and the cover-up persisted for decades (it took until 1990 for Mikhail Gorbachev to offer an official apology). Given the background, Katyn is as much about that burying of the truth as the atrocity itself, and Wajda excavates this by focusing on the build-up to the massacre, then jumping ahead a few years to focus on multiple female protagonists whose loved ones never returned.

Wajda's weighty themes – capitulation to the lie and the damaging effect this had on the nation's psyche – are pinpointed with clarity and precision, but he saves his most powerful blow for the final minutes, with a recreation of the full horror of the massacre that is as devastating as anything in Come and See or Schindler's List.