This film screens as part of the Polish Film Festival in America.
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In this era of worldwide video communication, the idea of national cinema has begun to lose its meaning; people are becoming too homogenized to recognize any kind of geographical border, too fixated on the present moment to bother with history. Can it be an accident, then, that the most nationalistic of national cinemas, brought to Chicagoans every year by the Polish Film Festival in America, is so locked into the past? In a decade covering the festival, I’ve lost count of how many films I’ve seen that deal, either directly or indirectly, with Polish history, especially the Nazi invasion and the Soviet oppression that followed. This conservative mind-set governs style as well as content: dominated by sober, traditionally staged dramas, the Polish cinema has been largely impervious to the sort of formal experimentation that made the Romanian new wave an object of interest to cinephiles. For better and for worse, the PFFA has always been a visit to the old country.
Directed by Andrzej Wajda 127 min. Sat 11/9, 7 PM Rosemont 18 9701 Bryn Mawr Rosemon 773-486-9612 (festival) $85 with reception $29 withoutpffamerica.org
