Escape from the Liberty Cinema

During a screening of a film called Daybreak at a provincial cinema, something unusual happens: the actors on the screen stop playing their parts, begin talking among themselves and start chatting with the audience in the hall. Word spreads, a crowd gathers outside the cinema, and the authorities have no idea what to do. Finally an official is sent from the censorship office to look into it, a man in his fifties who used to be a literary critic and a journalist. The film was made in 1990, the year censorship was fully abolished in Poland, and its central character is a censor. Wojciech Marczewski shows him not as a monster but as someone who knows exactly what his job is and has carried it for years. The story refers openly to Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the connection is stated inside the film itself. The revolt on the screen is not a fantasy game but a direct description of a country where supervision has come to an end. Janusz Gajos plays the censor.