Operation Hyacinth

Warsaw in the mid eighties. Robert, a young police officer, is assigned to a murder: a man stabbed many times in the chest, a homosexual. The file is closed quickly; his superiors produce a culprit and the matter ends. Robert is not convinced. He keeps investigating on his own and has to enter the gay circles of Warsaw to do it. In the same period the security service is running an operation to register those same people. Piotr Domalewski directs from a screenplay by Marcin Ciastoń. It was released on Netflix on 13 October 2021 and runs a hundred and twelve minutes. The operation of the title was real. Launched in Poland in 1985, Operation Hyacinth registered homosexuals on the pretext of tackling AIDS and prostitution; more than eleven thousand people were entered in the database and many were detained, questioned and threatened. The structure is a detective story and the real subject is the institution. As the investigation proceeds Robert sees what his own colleagues are doing. The second strand is Robert's own life; he has a fiancée and his father is a senior figure in the service. It won the screenplay award at the 2021 Polish Film Festival and the Golden Frog for best Polish film at Camerimage. Who it is for: viewers who follow Eastern European crime films and work about state repression. Who it is not for: the subject is heavy, the ending is without hope, and the detective shape at times gets in front of the historical matter.