Richard Chatten Andrzej Wajda aged 30 recreated the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising in his second film, 'Kanal' (1957); but it was to be another fifty years before at the age of 80 he could finally address himself to Poland's other great wartime trauma and the Big Lie that followed on its heels.We see the victims despatched with the same practised brutality in 1940 their executioners had already employed against their own countryfolk in the Purges of the thirties. Their method had been the traditional NKVD bullet in the back of the head subsequently employed by their former allies in the einzatsgruppen as they surged East before they turned to gassing during 1941 (the year that the Germans were ironically later accused by the Russians of committing the massacre at Katyn) to satisfy their increasingly urgent need to murder efficiently on an ever more widespread scale. Uncle Joe had by contrast been content merely to lop off Poland's potential post-war leadership and then lie about who had been responsible.

andreayfernandoalvarez The case of these mass murders is monstrous. The lie was maintained for 50 years and even today 70 years! after the European Court of Human Rights is stealing their rights to Poland. See "How can you change history The Katyn case." In: http://quenotelacuenten.verboencarnado.net/?p=812 In October 2013 , several media published the news that the European Court of Human Rights ( ECHR) had refused to speak on the Katyn slaughter of 1940, when Stalin's Red Army killed over twenty thousand Polish army officers , to be incompetent. The court , which had directed the relatives of the victims , said that since the event took place outside their jurisdiction, unable to speak on the extermination unable to evaluate research conducted by the Russian authorities. For this reason , both the request for compensation for the families of twelve of the Polish officers murdered , as the petition to require a conviction on the part of Russia on the facts has been futile .

MartinHafer This film from the famed Polish director Andrzej Wajda was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language movie. I can see why--it was very well made. However, I must warn you, that although the film is exceptionally well done and important, it is also among the most brutal I've seen in a long time--with lots of closeup shots of Polish soldiers getting executed in the most graphic way possible."Katyn" begins during the invasion of Poland in September, 1939. Although folks outside Poland today now about the Germans invading, a lot of films and history books fail to discuss that the Soviets did the same--crashing in this relatively defenseless nation in a power grab. In the process, they rounded up all the Polish officers--sending them off to prisoner of war camps and, ultimately, to their deaths inside the USSR at a place called Katyn Forest (hence the name of the film).Much of the film is set after the massacre and has to do with the Soviet attempt to whitewash the incident by blaming the Germans. However, a few people in this film refuse to accept the party line--much to their regret because the Soviets intended to sell this lie no matter who they had to hurt to get this false message across.Because it is so important to set the record straight historically speaking, I am very glad that "Katyn" was made. Poles and non-Poles need to face facts and accept reality. But, as I said above, this exceptionally well made film ALSO tells the story in all its brutality--with lots and lots of closeups of Polish officers having their brains blown out by Soviet criminals (I am not sure if they technically were soldiers or NKVD or KGB, but this clearly is a crime against humanity--so I'll stick with the word 'criminal'). Worth seeing but a film to keep from your children and the easily disturbed.

johnnyboyz Katyn is a curious; plodding and often dull war film delving into the horrors of World War Two that befell not soldiers on any sort of front line, nor the innocents and ethnic minorities who were the victims of the genocide, but is closer to a sort of best of both worlds: the prisoners of war and varying other personnel who were massacred at the Polish locale of Katyn, something forever linked to German instigation until it came to everyone's attention the Soviets were actually to blame. In spite of its setting, subject matter and quite obvious positive ethic on the subject, it is disappointingly droll; a stilted and eerily unmoving account of an event during the Second World War I knew nothing of, and barely got anything out of, bar the fact such a slice of history had been introduced to me where previously I was ignorant.I think above all else, the most disappointing aspect of the film is how it cannot quite pull off any sort of Nazi demythification process that is almost certainly inherent in the film's premise: to depict how we all got it wrong all this time. The event upon which the entire film is based is the Katyn massacre, something which brought about the deaths of an array of war struck Poles, and of which for decades saw the Germans pencilled in as the aggressors with all attempts to blame the true perpetrators (the Russians) most likely greeted with sneers; frowns and shakes of the head as the liberals look on in shock at the stubbornness of the Far-Right STILL yet unable to both come to terms as well as admit their foul play. The brutal, and quite clinical, nature whereby the Katyn massacre plays out calls to mind the best of those sorts of scenes from Holocaust films past and how we've so often seen those of a German ilk play out the role of aggressor: for here, they wear Russian uniforms.That's not to say Katyn is sympathetic of the Nazi's, but it damn well comes close to trying to get it into people's heads that war-time propaganda can be a load of nonsense and pop-culture depictions (Nazis: evil; Soviets: our uneasy allies who crusaded for us in The East) can often ring false. The film will open on a bridge, a busy bridge in a Polish city as people flee the locale east on account of the invading German army. As they do so, they meet a hurried crowd coming at them from the opposite direction: other Poles fleeing west on account of the invading Russian army and the question of choosing an apparent lesser of two evils are first implemented unto the audience. We follow a handful of characters, none of whom are that interesting and none of whom have their tales resonate. In fact, they are not so much characters as much as there are entities whom occupy the space on screen so that we may advance to a quite shocking scene depicting the truth.Where there are people on screen, they arrive in the form of a young woman named Ann (Ostaszewska), who has lost her husband to the conflict, but he is missing in action more-so killed already. Her husband, Andrzej (Zmijewski), is the man in question and we watch his father, Jan (Kowalski), occupy the frame during some of the more obligatory scenes during films of this nature: his role at the local university terminated as the structure itself is closed down by the Nazis on those typically fascist grounds forever linked to inequality and such. These people are not interesting, but the film isn't necessarily interested IN them; their presence and the premise to their scenarios a sort of shared, congealed item of imprisonment as Andrzej is stuck in a labour camp; Ann is imprisoned by her circumstance of being on the run and Jan is imprisoned by his own grief out of losing his university and son. These characters rarely get above the stage of being much more than your standard war genre stock personnel, whereas there are additionally too many of them while they often flit in and out of the text – sharing the core importance amongst them as they disappear and then reappear. Character study is not important, a sense of demythificaion is.As far as war films go, it isn't the intriguing battle of wits between two men that Schindler's List was, itself making a point (in the simplest of forms) about how "good" or how "evil" Nazis were. Nor is it the deathly effective tale of one person's survival on the front line that The Pianist or Come and See was; the film does not necessarily depict anybody that interesting, it is not Downfall and the piece is far from a resistance thriller of any nature. So what is it? An awareness piece - barely much more than an awareness piece that sort of wants to bite off a bit from each of these approaches. You might say it was an overly long history lesson building to an important event just so as to reach out to a wider body of people and get across the message that a miscarriage of justice befell the Nazis for so long.