“A STUNNING, EPIC film! Wajda has made one of the movies’ most potent evocations of a gruesome twentieth-century ritual…
and has reasserted, with power and grace, the history and identity of (a) nearly effaced country.”
– David Denby, The New Yorker

“FASCINATING! Poland’s greatest filmmaker caps his career with the story he has waited most of his life to tell.
KATYN, which sold millions of tickets and provoked a national debate in Poland, addresses a once-taboo, still-traumatic subject.
No movie has ever made the analogy between Hitlerism and Stalinism so visceral."
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“SEARING! KATYN, nominated for an Academy Award last year, is a powerful corrective to decades of distortion and forgetting.
With elegant concision, the film explores both the events leading up to the massacre and its aftermath…
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
Click here to read A.O. Scott’s full review in The New York Times.

“Remarkable…restrained, close to classical.” – Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times

“A highly emotional wartime drama…vivid and moving.” – Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter

FROM POLAND’S GREATEST LIVING DIRECTOR, ANDRZEJ WAJDA, comes the story he has waited a lifetime to tell: Katyn is the name of the forest where the Soviets secretly murdered 15,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and professionals over a 3-day period in 1940 (Wajda’s father among them). Stalin’s purpose was to destroy those elements of the population who would be most resistant to Soviet control following WWII. For decades the truth was obfuscated, with the Nazis often blamed for the atrocity. Half a century later, in 1990, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev admitted his nation’s responsibility. In this elegant production, Wajda recreates war-torn Poland and the stories of both the perpetrators and their victims. An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2008.

Listen to our podcast: Introduction by Polish Cultural Institute Director MONIKA FABIJANSKA (Recorded February 18, 2009)
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POLAND • 2007 • 121 MINS. • IN POLISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES • KOCH LORBER FILMS