http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&am...ma_050614170931Poland's Andrzej Wajda to make film about Katyn massacre
Tue Jun 14, 1:09 PM ET
WARSAW (AFP) - Polish director Andrzej Wajda said he planned to make a film
about the massacre of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn forest in 1940.
"It is my sad duty," he told the private radio RMF FM.
The script of the film about Katyn would "not be a historical account but will
concentrate on a few characteurs" and draw their psychological portraits, he
said.
Filming will begin at the end of 2005. The working title of the film is "Post
mortem".
Some 22,000 Polish officers and men were taken prisoner by the Red Army when the
Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in 1939 following the Molotov-Ribbentrop
non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that year.
On orders from Stalin, the Poles were shot in Katyn forest.
The Nazis revealed the crime in 1943, but the Soviet Union blamed Hitler's
Germany for the massacre. In 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged Soviet
responsibility.
Polish and Russian legal interpretations of the massacre are at odds with each
other.
Poland considers what happened at Katyn a war crime and, therefore, outside the
legal statute of limitations, but Russia's military prosecutor last year
classified the incident as a crime under civil jurisdiction and no longer
subject to prosecution.
Wajda, whose past classics include "Ashes and Diamonds" (1958), "Kanal" (1957),
and "Man of Iron", about the Solidarity strikes in Gdansk in the summer of 1980,
received an Oscar in 2000 for his life's work.
