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A tale and three cities
Each year the Polish film industry holds its very own festival, at which directors, writers, performers, critics, and various officials gather to assess the year's output - which this year ran to twenty-six features. The press conferences which follow each film are actually more like film-society discussions, and generally none too easy on the directors who, as Krzysztof Zanussi put it, must stand up to defend themselves. For the past two years foreign critics have also been invited to the proceedings.
As luck would have it, this September brought about 100 journalists to Gdansk, where, only a week before, striking shipyard workers had won the right to autonomous trade unions - unprecedented and indeed almost unthinkable in Eastern Europe. Poles always live in an atmosphere of ardent political speculation, but at the festival the situation was tense: further strikes were possible, which the government might try to suppress militarily, and the Russians might at some point decide that things had got out of control, and send in the tanks as they had in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Gdansk (which can be seen in some detail in The Tin Drum) has shared in enough tragic Polish history to be an appropriate site for the festival at such a moment; it has been restored, at immense cost, to pristine Hanseatic League condition. In a city that goes back at least 800 years, you get a somewhat different perspective on current events. Nonetheless, the most sophisticated of Polish film people feel that the present situation is another fatal national trap, like so many in Polish history. The working class has turned against the state bureaucracy, but the bureaucracy has little to give economically and cannot allow the new unions to have uncensored publications (which would voice stinging criticisms of the regime) without losing the absolute control which is the essence of a totalitarian state.
Despite such tensions, the festival proceeded calmly. The high point was the showing of a rough cut of footage shot during the final negotiations toward the end of the strikes. This showing required extensive negotiation itself, presumably to secure authorization from the minister responsible for the film industry, and thus the festival. Part of the purpose for the showing was...