Kino Kultura
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Kino Kultura: Polish Film Revue September 18-20
Where Roncesvalles Ave. and King St. meet, there sits an imposing bronze monument that’s about five metres high and four metres across. The sculpture is rent in half by a jagged vertical fissure, and its concrete base bears a single word running its full width: KATYN. How many of us who’ve walked or driven past know what the monument represents? Yet, this bronze identifies an event that’s seared into the psyche of the post-war Polish community and the immigrants who settled in the Roncesvalles neighbourhood.
Those who come to The Revue Cinema on Roncesvalles and see one of three screenings of Katyn, a film by the eminent Polish director Andrzej Wajda, will learn what that charged word means. The film, which earned numerous Polish awards and international recognition, including a 2007 Oscar nomination for best foreign film, will headline Kino Kultura, a Polish film festival scheduled at The Revue Friday, September 18th to Sunday, September 20th.
The Roncesvalles Village BIA and The Revue worked closely to establish this new cultural event, which coincides with the BIA’s Roncesvalles Polish Festival. More than 175,000 are expected at the street celebration, now in its fifth year.
Kino Kultura was currated by Marta Ogonek, a Polish filmmaker and actress now living in Toronto. As artistic director, she has put together a range of Polish media including animated shorts, music videos and a group of outstanding films highlighted by three directed by Wajda: Pan Tadeusz and Zemsta (The Revenge) in addition to Katyn. Films by other directors include suspense, drama and comedy, showcasing Polish filmmaking talent over the past decade. All of the films are in Polish with English subtitles.
Wajda, Kino Kultura’s featured director, has been a dominant figure among post-World War II Polish filmmaking. In 1999, he received an honorary Oscar recognizing “five decades of extraordinary film direction.” The Revue is particularly pleased to offer an opportunity to view Katyn. It has been screened only once before in Toronto at the 2008 Eh!U Meet The Europeans – European Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award. It is not available on video. This is a film designated “A Movie That Matters” by Anne Applebaum in the New York Review of Books. It has been seen by millions in Poland, where, it seems, everyone has an opinion about the movie.
Katyn is a forest in western Russia. More than 20,000 Polish military officers and other professionals were killed and buried there and at prison camps by the USSR secret police in the spring and summer of 1940 on orders of the Soviet Politburo. They had been captured by Soviet troops invading eastern Poland a week after Nazi Germany had entered western Poland on Sept. 1, 1939 and triggered World War II.
The atrocity was revealed to the world by Germany in 1942 after it had invaded the USSR and uncovered mass graves. The USSR denied responsibility and continued to do so through the war and into the subsequent period of its domination of Poland. In postwar Poland, Soviet culpability for Katyn was a taboo subject and the very word took on enormous symbolic significance. As critic Applebaum puts it in her review: “Katyn wasn't a single wartime event, but a series of lies and distortions, told over decades, designed to disguise the reality of the Soviet postwar occupation and Poland's loss of sovereignty.”
For a Kino Kultura schedule, film descriptions, a profile of Andrzej Wajda and more details on Katyn, Watch revuecinema.ca for festival updates.
CLICK HERE for the Roncesvalles Polish Festival website
