Eroica

Two separate stories in two separate keys. In the first, during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, a selfish man trying to keep out of the war finds himself inside the fight without meaning to and behaves like a hero in spite of himself. In the second, in a prison camp, Polish officers go on believing that one of their own escaped. Andrzej Munk's Polish film takes aim directly at the story a nation tells about heroism. The first part is comic and the second grows darker; both ask the same question: is heroism real, or is it a story people need. The film caused argument in Poland when it came out, because it would not leave the national account alone.