Slideshow
LOTNA
Poland, 1959
Directed by Andrzej Wajda
Starring Jerzy Pichelski, Adam Pawlikowski, Bożena Kurowska, Jerzy Moes, Mieczysław Łoza, Roman Polański
Approx. 90 mins.
Perhaps the most personally meaningful of Wajda’s World War II movies, LOTNA was likely inspired by the director’s admiration for his father, a Polish cavalry officer who was killed during the Katyń massacre in 1940. LOTNA is a beautiful white horse, given as a gift by a wealthy landowner to a Polish cavalry troop in the fateful year of 1939. As the Germans attack with planes and tanks, the underequipped Polish army relies on archaic resources, such as the cavalry. Symbolic and at times surreal, the film was controversial at the time of its release for suggesting Polish foolhardiness in the face of the Nazi threat.
Presented with support from The Ashes and Diamonds Fund for Eastern European Film
Reviews
“A symbolic film, LOTNA explains Wajda better than any of his other pictures... it is the marvelous poem of a rebel aesthete, of a man who uses a romantic cinema to describe a war the was not in the least romantic.”
– Ado Kyrou, Positif