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Please join us for
the Canadian Premiere of a very important film!
September 9, 2013, 7:00 PM
Library & Archives Canada
395 Wellington
Film,
Remarks by Professor Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa,
Q&A, and private reception.
Aftermath
was just given a special award at the 2013 Jerusalem Film
Festival by the Yad Vashem Institute!
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Aftermath
(Poklosie) trailer Wladyslaw Pasikowski Apple Film Production
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Aftermath is a film based on one of the most
controversial episodes in Poland's World War II history, the
Jedwabne massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbours.
Inspired by the 1942 tragedy in which
hundreds of Jews were burned alive in a barn, an event long
blamed on Nazi Germany, "Poklosie"
("Aftermath") was directed by Wladyslaw Pasikowski.
"I wanted to tell a story that
would interest a broad number of Poles because it is one of the
most painful parts of our country's history," Pasikowski
said recently.
"We already have a huge number
of films on the horrors committed by the Soviets and the Germans,
and it's time to say what bad things we did ourselves."
The director said he was inspired by
"Neighbours", a book by Polish-origin US historian Jan
Tomasz Gross, which sent shock-waves across Poland when it was
published in 2000.
Gross shed light on the role of local
residents in the massacre in the eastern Polish village, sparking
a bitter debate in Poland.
According to various historians'
estimates, between 340 and 1,500 Jews perished in the massacre.
In 2003, a Polish commission of
inquiry concluded that the massacre was perpetrated by Jedwabne's
Poles, urged on by the Nazi occupiers, rather than by the latter,
as long claimed.
Pasikowski said he was also influenced
by French director and Holocaust survivor Claude Lanzmann's 1985
work "Shoah", as well as the documentaries of Poland's
Pawel Lozinski.
His film is set in the 1990s, in the
wake of the 1989 fall of Poland's post-war communist regime and
shortly before the revelations about Jedwabne.
Its message is that covering up the
truth of the past can have terrible consequences decades later.
The action takes place in the
fictional village of Gorowka - the site of a war-time massacre -
where present-day residents try to intimidate a man who aims to
conserve Jewish tombstones and uncover the past.
Pasikowski, already known for his
thrillers, stokes the tension until the film's tragic end.
"I didn't want to make a film
that would be a look back at Jedwabne," he said.
"I made this film as a 'goy' and
a Pole," he said, using a Hebrew term for someone who is not
Jewish.
"As such, I only had the right
to make a film about Poles," he added.
Polish directing legend Andrzej Wajda
has already hailed the work.
"This is one of those films that
will go down in cinematic history," he told the Polish news
channel TVN.
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