Slideshow
KANAŁ
Poland, 1957
Directed by Andrzej Wajda
Starring Teresa Iżewska, Tadeusz Janczar, Wienczysław Glinski
WINNER Cannes Film Festival – Special Jury Prize, 1957
Approx. 91 mins.
During the celebrated four-minute long shot that introduces us to the beleaguered underground of fighters in Warsaw resisting the Nazi occupation in 1944, the narrator tells us, “These are the heroes of the tragedy. Watch them closely for these are the last hours of our lives.” The centerpiece of Wajda’s “War Trilogy,” and the first Polish film to depict the Warsaw Uprising, KANAŁ follows the fighters through a hopeless but heroic journey that will take them into the city’s sewer system, the only place they can survive. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at Cannes (along with Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL), it became the first of Wajda’s films to open in the U.S. when it premiered at Dan Talbot’s New Yorker Theater in 1961.
Presented with support from The Ashes and Diamonds Fund for Eastern European Film and The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film
Reviews
“A remarkable experience in a number of ways... first of all for its tragic power, its obsessive picture of a nightmare world, its insistence on the human dramas continuing within the chaos.”
– Lindsay Anderson
“If this remarkable film is a true indication of his talent, Wajda should soon become as talked about and admired by U.S. art theatre patrons as Bergman and Fellini.”
– Richard Gertner, Motion Picture Daily
“Maybe KANAŁ will mark the beginning of the truth being told about history, about ourselves, about a whole generation. Perhaps it will prove to be art as a warning, art of purgation, a triumph of the heroism of life over the heroism of death.”
– Aleksander Jackiewicz