25 Years of Innocence

Tomasz Komenda was twenty-three when he was taken from his home one night. The charge was the rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old girl. The expert reports pointed at him and everything available was against him. He was given twenty-five years. In prison he was beaten, humiliated and left alone. Eighteen years in, a prosecutor and a policeman reopened the file. Komenda was released in 2018 and acquitted by the Supreme Court two months later. He received the largest compensation Poland has ever paid. He died of lung cancer in 2024, at forty-seven. Jan Holoubek directs, with Piotr Trojan as Komenda and Agata Kulesza as his mother. A hundred and twelve minutes.