Krystyna Janda

Golem

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Pernat with newspaper stuffed in his mouth

Golem is the first of Polish director Piotr Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy – as it’s sometimes called – and is also often credited as being one of the inspirations for Blade Runner. Before Ridley Scott fans start rubbing their hands together with glee, Szulkin is far less interested in entertainment than Scott. His film is bleaker, more paranoid and more obviously Kafkaesque than Blade Runner. Think Rainer Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz meets Terry Gilliam’s Brazil rubbed all over with an oily rag heavy with swarf. It’s political too, in a coded sort of way and though set ostensibly in a destroyed society decades after an apocalyptic nuclear event, it’s clear that Szulkin has Communist Poland in … Read more

Interrogation

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Janusz Gajos and Krystyna Janda

It took real courage to make Interrogation. Known as Przesluchanie in the original Polish, it looked like career suicide for everyone involved in the making of it. Even given the easier political situation in Poland once the Solidarity union had started making headway from 1980 onwards, the film’s message – that the regime was inhumane, Nazi even – was never going to be tolerated by the authorities. And it wasn’t. Banned before it appeared in 1982, it was nevertheless widely seen in Poland, thanks to pirate tapes played on VHS machines, which had only recently been introduced to Poland. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 it finally got its official release and … Read more