Starring: Michalina Labacz, Vasili Vasylyk, Arkadiusz Jakubik, Izabela Kuna
Directed by: Wojciech Smarzowski
Rating: ★★★★☆
Some detractors might think the release of Wołyń (Hatred) was cunningly planned beforehand. The massacres perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalist (UPA) during the Second World War sparked an uneasy debate in Poland. In July 2016 Polish Senate used the word “genocide” and established July 11 as a National Day of Remembrance to commemorate the purge of Poles in the Nazi-occupied territories.
Coverage from domestic media on the topic has increased recently, but Smarzowski did not ride it just to increase his audience: “I started this project before Euromaidan. My aim was to avoid a nuance-less depiction of the events. I am a Pole so the movie was made from a Polish perspective, but Ukrainians also had their reasons.”
Hatred opens with an interethnic marriage between an Ukrainian boy and Polish girl in the countryside of Volhinia: a bacchanal as much debauched and intoxicating as the one featured in The Wedding (2004), his full-length debut. The harmony is suddenly broken and the Polish cineaste rushes the audience to a spiral of violence. Hatred is interspersed with gory killings and medievalesque tortures that seem to be taken from Bosch’s paintings. Poles are the main victims of massacres, but the escalation of sectarian violence is fueled by bipartisan propaganda like in the scene where a Polish priest is inciting to hatred for his Ukrainian orthodox neighbours.
In the history of Polish cinema, Hatred can be put near Andrzej Wajda’s masterstroke The Promised Land (1975), due to its anti-romantic depiction of historical events. Viewers with a strong stomach will be utterly rewarded with Piotr Sobocinski’s brilliant cinematography. Once again after Rose (2011), Smarzowski pillaged the visual conventions of the western genre, especially in the metaphoric epilogue that would drive Claude Lanzmann and several French film critics opposing Wajda’s Korczak (1990) out of their minds. The fact that such a talented director decided to open one of the Pandora’s boxes from Poland’s recent history is a privilege for movie-goers.
Originally published by The Krakow Post on December 06, 2016