Salto

A man jumps from a moving train and walks into a small town. He introduces himself, says the people there remember him, and speaks of a shared past from the war years. Some of the townspeople confirm it, others are suspicious. How much of what the man says is true and how much invented never becomes clear. The town takes him in all the same. Tadeusz Konwicki's film is concerned with how postwar Poland remembers and forgets: everyone has a story and none of them is complete. Zbigniew Cybulski takes the lead; he was the best known face in Polish cinema. The film's mass dance scene became an emblem in Poland. The telling is not realist; it sits between dream and mockery.