Shivers

1955, Poland. The heaviest years of Stalinist pressure. Twelve-year-old Tomek's father is taken away and the boy is sent to a camp. There he is taught a new world every day: who to believe, who the enemy is, what to love. Slowly the boy is shaped by what he is taught. Wojciech Marczewski's film describes that change without turning anyone into a monster; even the instructor teaching at the camp is doing something she believes in. What is really being told is how a child is drawn away from his own family and his own thinking. It won the Special Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982 and was banned from screening in Poland at the time. It is counted among the most important works of Polish cinema in the eighties.