Hands Up!

Five doctors meeting for the anniversary of their graduation climb into a freight wagon and spend the night there. As the drinking goes on they talk about their student years and the compromises they made then. At the centre of the talk is a portrait of Stalin they once made at school: by mistake, with two pairs of eyes. The film is not interested in nostalgia. It is interested in complicity: these men adapted to the Stalin years and are now trying to turn it into a joke. The wagon does not move, they go nowhere, and the film shows that literally. The form is enclosed and strange: almost all of it happens in one wagon, the light is limited and the scenes grow steadily more abstract. Jerzy Skolimowski wrote, directed and acted in it. It was shot in 1967 and banned by the censors; they demanded the removal of the two-eyed Stalin, and he refused. The ban ran over seventeen years and the director left the country. The film could only be shown in 1981, with a new colour prologue of about twenty-five minutes that Skolimowski shot in Beirut and London, in which he recounts the ban and his departure himself. Who it is for: viewers curious about Polish cinema and the history of censorship. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a unified whole. The added prologue is not in the same language as the rest and the structure is split in two.