Special presentation of Wajda's KATYN on CUNY TV

• SATURDAY, MAY 1 - 9:00 PM
  
• SUNDAY, MAY 2 - 9:00 PM
  
• FRIDAY night, MAY 7 - 12:00 midnight
  

KATYN: Poland 2007, 121 min

Directed by Andrzej Wajda
Written by Andrzej Mularczyk, Andrzej Wajda, Wladyslaw Pasikowski based on Andrzej Mularczyk's novel Post Mortem
Music by Krzysztof Penderecki
Cinematography by Pawel Edelman, Marek Rajca

with Maja Ostaszewska, Artur Zmijewski, Maja Komorowska, Wladyslaw Kowalski, Andrzej Chyra, Jan Englert, Danuta Stenka, Magdalena Cielecka

Produced by Akson Studio, Polish National Television Telekomunikacja Polska S.A., Polish Film Institute
In Polish with English subtitles

CUNY TV, Channel 75

"Katyn" is a powerful corrective to decades of distortion and forgetting (...) The result is a film with a stately, deliberate quality that insulates it against sentimentality and makes it all the more devastating. – A. O. Scott, The New York Times

The Polish Cultural Institute presents Andrzej Wajda's 2008 Oscar-nominated film Katyn to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre – one of the most significant events in Polish history. The memory of this event, in which 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were murdered by the Soviet NKVD, is especially painful today due to the recent tragedy of April 10th, when the President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, First Lady Maria Kaczynska, Members of the Polish Parliament and Government, members of the Katyn Families, other high-ranking dignitaries, and the entire crew, lost their lives in an airplane crash in Smolensk, Russia. They were on their way to a ceremony to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Katyn.

Katyn is the story Wajda waited a lifetime to tell: Katyn Forest was one of three main locations where, in April–May 1940, the Soviets secretly murdered 14,500 Polish POWs who had been held in three special NKVD camps: officers, intellectuals, and professionals. Another 7,300 prisoners held in NKVD jails in Ukraine and Belarus were also shot at this time. Wajda, who was 14 years old at the time, lost his own father in the massacre. Stalin's purpose was to destroy those elements of the population who would be most resistant to Soviet control following WWII. The Soviets accused the Germans of the crime, and for decades the truth was obfuscated. In this powerful, sophisticated production, Wajda recreates war–torn Poland and the stories of both the perpetrators and their victims. The film tells the story of both the massacre and its cover–up under Soviet rule – the "Katyn Lie." After the war, the families of the victims had to live with the pain not only of this immense crime, but also of its manipulation by the totalitarian regime. In communist Poland, telling the truth about Katyn led to persecution by the secret police. An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2008, Katyn was a huge success in Poland, playing in nearly every cinema in the country, and selling more than 2.7 million tickets (in a nation of 39 million). The film was also distributed widely in the U.S.

Andrzej Wajda, a legend of Polish and European cinema, has throughout his over half-century–long career been engaged in capturing the history of Poland, often stirring passionate, nationwide debates. The 84–year–old director is best known in the U.S. for his World War II trilogy – Generation (1954), Kanal (1957), and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) – as well as for the more recent Man of Marble (1977), Man of Iron (1981) and Danton (1983). Wajda was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2000 and was recently the subject of a month–long retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater.