Janusz Gajos

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Kazimierz Kutz realized with great attention to details a pathetic fresco about those dramatic events. His film, of unquestionable artistic value, is also a tribute to the courage and determination of miners who did not hesitate to give their lives for the ideals of August Uprising. Katowice, the night of December 12-13, 1981. Military units occupy strategic points in the city. General Jaruzelski is about to announce martial law on television. A group of henchmen, breaking union security, drag the chairman of the works committee of the Solidarity trade union in the “Wujek” mine out of his apartment. The news of this quickly spreads to the miners. Initially surprised, they soon react with a spontaneous protest. On December 14th a strike breaks out in the plant. The workers demand the lifting of martial law and the release of the chairman. Negotiations with the authorities end in a fiasco. The army, ZOMO and the militia prepare to storm the mine.Read More »

In the mid-1960s, a respected surgeon dreams of leaving Poland to see his wife and daughter in England. To get the money for his escape, he needs to consider taking part in a bank robbery.Read More »

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The most playful and also the grittiest of Kieślowski’s Three Colors films follows the adventures of Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a Polish immigrant living in France. The hapless hairdresser opts to leave Paris for his native Warsaw when his wife (Julie Delpy) sues him for divorce (her reason: their marriage was never consummated) and then frames him for arson after setting her own salon ablaze. White, which goes on to chronicle Karol Karol’s elaborate revenge plot, manages to be both a ticklish dark comedy about the economic inequalities of Eastern and Western Europe and a sublime reverie about twisted love.Read More »

The Yellow Scarf is a film by Janusz Morgenstern from 2000. Janusz Gajos plays its protaganist, a man fighting with alcoholism, and is proof that television productions do not have to be worse than feature films.

The protagonist – a middle-aged man at the top of his career – does not have a name, nor a surname; he is a universal character, an everyman that everyone can identify with. On the Christmas Eve he consecutively meets with his employees, his ex-wife, his son and his present partner. His persistently prolonged rambling is meant to postpone the inevitable Christmas visit to his mother.Read More »

Ryszard Bugajski’s Przesluchanie (Interrogation) is a powerful movie about a certain time in Polish history, that was marked by censorship and oppression and this is where Antonina ‘Tonia’ Dziwisz is caught up in. Played by one of Poland’s most remarkable actresses, Krystyna Janda, it is her that along with the wonderful cinematography work and realistic portrayal of prison conditions makes this movie so incredible. It is through her eyes that we see the story unfold and the suffering of her and her prison inmates (with some great co-acting by the likes of Agnieszka Holland). This is along with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s and Andrzej Wajda’s finest work one of the defining moments of Polish cinema, and beyond that. Certainly one of the most powerful prison movies ever made in my book, not just within the perspective of Polish or European cinema as such. And in the wake of events like Guantanamo bay or Abu Ghraib it still is as fresh and important with the covered subject as it was when it was made, reminding us how things could go horribly wrong within a judicial and in the end prison system. Due to it’s critical stance at the time of making, it was banned by the local government for 7 years, until the Soviet bloc broke up. An extremely powerful reminder of that time.Read More »