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Wajda's Katyn Gets Oscar Nomination

Tadeusz Sobolewski 2008.01.23 12:09 Gazeta Wyborcza


Thanks to the Oscar nomination, Andrzej Wajda's film, which has drawn an audience of three million in Poland, has a chance to make an international career. And to make the Katyn massacre more widely known.


+ Fot. Bartosz Bobkowski / AG

Andrzej Wajda na wczorajszej konferencji w Polskim Instytucie Sztuki Filmowej: - Niewykluczone, ¿e umiem robiæ filmy


ZOBACZ TAK¯E

"Katyñ" do Oscara (23-01-08, 02:00)

The nomination comes as a pleasant surprise. The Polish critics didn't believe in the movie. First they said it wouldn't appeal to the Polish audience, then that it wouldn't appeal to the international one. But Katyn has already been seen by three million people in Poland, and, in the voting by Academy members, beat movies that had won some of the world's biggest film festivals. Mr Wajda has shown once again that he is the most 'American' of our filmmakers - one able to sense the public's expectations. He's made a movie that has some didacticism about it, but one that's pure, tragic in tone, and devoid of hatred or propaganda. The story of the Katyn massacre is finally finding its way to the international public. The truth about it was censored not only in the Soviet bloc.

Katyn's rivals for best foreign-language film include Austria's historical drama The Counterfeiters (the plot set at the Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald), and Nikita Mikhalkov's 12 which deals with the Chechen issue. Katyn stands a good chance of actually winning the award.

 

'There are stories that take a long time to fulfil themselves', Mr Wajda told Gazeta.

Other Polish-related nominations include Peter & the Wolf, a British animation shot entirely at, and co-produced by, £ód¼'s Se-Ma-For studios, for best animated short film, and Janusz Kamiñski for cinematography to Julian Schnabel's moving The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Besides that, eight nominations each for the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men and for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood.

¬ród³o: Gazeta Wyborcza