Starring: Michał Kowalski, Marta Honzatko, Cezary Rybiński
Directed by: Antoni Krauze
Rating: ★★★☆☆
It is no wonder that the need to direct a feature about the 1970 protests in Poland and their unarmed victims came from a director belonging to the same generation as the workers who were slaughtered in the Baltic cities. Antoni Krauze is almost a contemporary of directors such as Krzysztof Kieślowski and Agnieszka Holland, who radically reinvented Polish cinema in the 1970s.
The idea behind Czarny czwartek (Black Thursday) originated with the script’s co-author Mirosław Pepka, who convinced Krauze to examine the same ground that Andrzej Wajda had covered exactly 30 years earlier in Człowiek z żelaza (The Man of Iron, 1981). The movie was shot in Gdynia, one of the epicentres of the protests, and features an impressive number of walk-ons that help to achieve a spectacular but gritty authenticity in the riot scenes. Krauze employs a moderate quantity of blood, in keeping with the gory nature of the original script, which was based on accounts from the local hospital staff who treated 1,100 people in December 1970.
Black Thursday is more than a collection of crowd scenes focusing on several shameful and relatively unknown aspects of those dark days, such as the suspiciously rapid and semi-clandestine burial of the victims. Krauze also tries to give some political insight into what was happening behind the curtains that pushed the Communist leadership to stamp on the revolt. The resonant voice of First Secretary Władysław Gomułka (Wojciech Pszoniak) reporting a phone call from the Soviet Union to the Party faithful presages the brutal baptism of a freedom movement that was still a long way from its final triumph.
Originally published by The Krakow Post on September 22 2011