Black Thursday

In December 1970 the Polish government suddenly raised food prices. The next day the workers at the Gdansk shipyard stopped work and went into the street; the protests spread to Gdynia. On the morning of 17 December the army and the militia opened fire on a crowd on its way to work. The film tells this through the family of one shipyard worker: an ordinary morning, an ordinary railway station. Antoni Krauze's film came out in 2011; for years the events could not be spoken about officially in Poland. According to the official figures more than forty people were killed and more than a thousand wounded. Janek Wiśniewski in the title is not a real name, it comes from a ballad written after the events. The telling manufactures no heroism; it shows that among the dead were people who had not joined the protest and were only going to work.