A Short Film About Killing

A twenty-year-old named Jacek kills a taxi driver for no reason. The scene is long, clumsy and unbearable. In the second half the state does the same thing, properly and by procedure, and that scene runs just as long. Kieślowski developed the film out of the fifth part of Dekalog and reshot it as a feature. Cinematographer Sławomir Idziak used green filters and made the world deliberately ugly. Kieślowski put it plainly: he wanted to dirty this world. The result looks close to monochrome and diseased. It arrived while Poland had suspended capital punishment and landed in the middle of that argument. In a 2012 poll one director said it directly: in Poland this film was instrumental in the abolition of the death penalty. It won the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 1988 and took Best Film at the first European Film Awards. Who it is for: viewers who want a moral question asked through form. Who it is not for: anyone avoiding violence. Neither killing is shortened, and the film does that precisely to make the audience uncomfortable.