DVD 118 IMDB

In Collection
#4038

History, War

Andrzej Chyra	Lt. Jerzy
Maja Ostaszewska	Anna
Artur Zmijewski	Andrzej
Danuta Stenka	Róza
Jan Englert	General
Magdalena Cielecka	Agnieszka
Agnieszka Glinska	Irena
Pawel Malaszynski	Lt. Piotr
Maja Komorowska	Andrzej's Mother
Wladyslaw Kowalski	Professor Jan

Director	Andrzej Wajda
Producer	Michal Kwiecinski
Writer	Andrzej Wajda; Wladyslaw Pasikowski
Cinematography	Pawel Edelman
Musician	Krzysztof Penderecki

Katyn is a gripping and tragic story about the Polish officers killed by the Soviets in 1940. It begins with Poles fleeing the separate German and Russian invasions meeting on a bridge. Anna (Maja Ostaszewska), the wife of a captain, is searching for him among the wounded and captured soldiers. She eventually finds him and begs him to escape but he follows his duty to stand his ground. Anna eventually escapes with her daughter to Krakow to live with her mother-in-law where she finds that her father's husband, a professor at Jagiellon University, has been taken prisoner by the Nazis. The Nazis find the mass graves and try to force a general's wife to be part of their propaganda denouncing the Soviets. After the war the Soviets blame the Germans. Two sisters of one of the murdered men chose different means of remembering, one goes to prison for having a tombstone with the correct date created. The other works with the regime but is subversive, including allowing the son of one of the murdered men into her school even though he refuses to change his application to accept the lie, the Soviets are promulgating. One of the survivors cant live with the lie and commits suicide.