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12 WINNERS & 6 NOMINEES
ACADEMY AWARDS NOMINEE BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

★★★★
“POWERFUL” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“A GREAT MOVIE”   Mike LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

“A STUNNING, EPIC FILM” David Denby, THE New Yorker

★★★★
“Hats Off To Polish Director Andrzej Wajda, Who Has Had The Courage To Say The Unsayable…” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“A Stunning Atrocity” Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

“Almost Like An Academic Master Class, Meticulously Exploring The Event’s Ramifications But Only Catching Full Fire At The End.” Leslie Felperin, Variety

“An Unrelentingly Powerful And Seamless Indictment Of Two Brutal Political Systems” Bruce Eder, TV Guide

Directed by the famed Polish director Andrzej Wajda, KATYN is about the murder of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Secret Police during World War II. Among them Wajda’s own father.

Regarded as Wajda’s most important and long-awaited film, KATYN uses stories from authentic diaries and letters to tell the fate of four fictional officers and their families. Through them it shows the predicament of Poland attacked from the west by the Nazis on 1939 and on Sept 17 by the Soviets from the east under a secret deal between Stalin and Hitler. The disappearance of over 15,000 officers was a mystery at first. The news of the tragedy was finally revealed in the spring of 1943 after the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union and discovered the mass graves. However Soviet propaganda blamed the deaths on Adolf Hitler and punished anyone speaking the truth with harsh prison terms. In 1990 after being kept secret by the Cold War for almost 60 years, the Kremlin officially confessed that dictator Joseph Stalin’s secret police were responsible for the crime.