May 7, 2008
‘The bloodshed had to be shown’
First of all, I decided the massacre must be a part of the film . . . . Although people knew that these soldiers and intelligentsia were brutally murdered, and could imagine how they were murdered, I still decided that the bloodshed had to be shown.
The great Andrzej Wajda is still with us, still working, still directing films. Now eighty years old, he has given us Katyn, a film about the 1940 Soviet massacre of nearly twenty-two thousand Polish prisoners executed and dumped in mass graves in the Katyn forest and environs.
Geoffrey Macnab, whose interview with Wajda appears in the May issue of The Guardian, writes of the director as “one of the last links with the ‘Polish film school’, a group of directors who emerged in the 1950s, defining themselves in opposition to Soviet film-making”.
According to Macnab, close to three milion people have already seen the film, released in Poland in autumn 2007. A public screening scheduled in Moscow on March 5 (the anniversary of Stalin’s death) was cancelled in favor of a private showing, but Wajda vows the film will find a Russian distributor. Its first public showing in Moscow is slated for a film festival in June.
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