The Wedding Day

An expensive wedding is being prepared in a Polish town; the groom's family has money, the bride's grandfather is old and ill. As the celebration runs on, the film moves eighty years back into the same town, to the day in 1941 when neighbours killed their Jewish neighbours. The two times mix into each other stage by stage, until the noise of the wedding and the sounds of that day are heard in the same scene. Wojciech Smarzowski bases the wartime strand openly on Jedwabne, where on 10 July 1941 hundreds of Jews were murdered by people from their own town. Earlier Polish films on the subject mostly looked at the aftermath; Smarzowski shows the violence directly and sets it beside the xenophobia at today's wedding table. The film provoked hard argument in Poland. On the poster the L in the title is written with the Hebrew letter lamed.