Interrogation

Interrogation (Przesłuchanie), directed by Ryszard Bugajski and starring Krystyna Janda, is a Polish film about an apolitical cabaret singer in early 1950s Stalinist Poland who is arbitrarily arrested and pressured into a forced confession. The film was shot in 1982, and its script slipped past censors while authorities were preoccupied with preparing martial law; once finished, however, the communist regime banned it for more than seven years, branding it the most anti-communist film in the history of the Polish People's Republic. Director Bugajski hid the negative to protect it from destruction, and the film circulated underground on smuggled VHS copies, gaining a cult following, while Bugajski himself went into exile in Canada with a bootleg copy. The film finally had its official premiere in 1989, after the collapse of the regime it depicted; at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, Krystyna Janda won Best Actress and the film was nominated for the Palme d'Or. Who it's for: anyone curious about a Polish film that could only premiere seven years after it was made, once the regime it portrayed had collapsed, having become an underground cult classic on smuggled VHS tapes in the meantime. Who it's not for: those assuming the film depicts one specific real prisoner's biography, since the narrative is a fictional composite drawn from the era's broader patterns of repression.