Acclaimed Polish director and winner of a lifetime achievement Academy Award, Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds, Man of Marble, Danton) has created an epic and personal tale about one of WWII's notorious cover-ups. In the village of Katyn in May 1940, the Soviet army brutally murdered 15,000 Polish POWs, to crush Polish hopes for future independence. For 50 years afterward, the USSR denied responsibility, cynically blaming the Nazis. Wajda, whose father was one of those killed, focuses less on the crimes of war than on the people left in its wake. Their interwoven stories draw us into a world where the struggle for memory and truth takes place amid a chilling conspiracy of silence. The Soviet Union finally admitted to the crime in 1990. Katyn became a cause célèbre and a national event in Poland when it was released there in 2007. In his New York Times review, A.O. Scott called Wajda a “tireless, clear-sighted chronicler” and the film a “powerful corrective to decades of distortion and forgetting.” —Deborah Kaufman, Mill Valley Film Festival (118 min, Koch Lorber)

Showtimes: 2:05 pm, 4:35 pm, 7:10 pm, 9:40 pm. Saturday and Sunday matinees at 11:35 am.

View full SFFS Screen schedule


Written by Andrzej Mularczyk, Przemyslaw Nowakowski, Wladyslaw Pasikowski, Andrzej Wajda. Photographed by Pawel Edelman. With Artur Zmijewski, Maja Ostaszewska, Andrzej Chyra. (118 min, Koch Lorber)