Hear My Cry

The documentary takes up Ryszard Siwiec. Siwiec was an accountant living in the south-east of Poland. In September 1968 he went to the stadium in Warsaw. A national holiday was being marked that day. There were thousands of people in the stadium. Siwiec set himself on fire there. His act was against the entry of Warsaw Pact forces into Czechoslovakia. It was an objection to communist totalitarianism as well. Badly burned, Siwiec was taken to hospital and died there. His act went unnoticed at the time. The director first heard Siwiec’s name only in the summer of 1989. He looked through the newspapers of 1968 first and found nothing. Maria, Elżbieta, Wit and Adam Siwiec speak in Maciej J. Drygas’s Polish documentary of 1991, which runs forty three minutes.