Spikelets (film)

The film takes place in 2001 in a provincial village ^[2] . Frantisek Kalina ( Irenaeus Chop ), who emigrated to the United States twenty years ago, arrives home to visit his brother Józef ( Maciej Stur ) and discovers that his brother has become an outcast for some reason.

Frantisek later finds out the reason for this: Jozef collected tombstones from a Jewish cemetery destroyed in the past, which the locals used to pave the road or other utilitarian purposes. Jozef kept these tombstones on his field. Jozef could not get a loan from the bank, because the documents for his farm were not in order. Going to the archive, Frantisek found out that his father and many other villagers became owners of their houses at the end of World War II , and before that these houses belonged to Jews who were allegedly killed by the Germans.

The further Frantisek and Jozef conduct the investigation, the more they are faced with hostile attitude and direct threats. To find out the fate of the Jews, Frantisek asked the old people who remembered the war. None of them gave a clear answer, but according to some hints, Frantisek realized that Jews could have been killed in a house in the swamps, which had previously belonged to his father, but was now abandoned. There, the brothers unearthed the burial place of the victims of massacre. An old sorceress living nearby told them that these Jews were locked up in the house and burned by the Poles themselves, who, although they carried out the order of the Germans, were glad to get rid of the Jews themselves. The brothers go to the old man Malinovsky, who personally set fire to the house in 1945, but they learn from him that along with him the house was set on fire by Stanislav Kalina, the father of the brothers.

Not knowing what to do with the revealed knowledge, the brothers quarrel, and Frantisek leaves the village in the morning to return to the United States. But in the morning a local resident catches up with him to report that Jozef was brutally killed at night. The final frames of the film show that a memorial in memory of the murdered Jews was erected on the field where Jozef kept the tombstones.

Pasikovsky came up with the idea to remove Spikelets after the publication of the book Neighbors by the historian Jan T. Gross in 2000. In this book, Gross investigated the massacre of Polish Jews in Edwabna in 1941 and came to the conclusion that the murders were not carried out by the Nazis, as previously thought, but by the Poles themselves. This discovery caused a major scandal in Poland, as it contradicted the traditional idea that during the Second World War the Poles were exclusively victims. At the same time, the events described in the film are completely fictitious, it does not contain any direct indications of Edvabna ^{[2] [3]} . Due to the painful topic for Polish society, Dariusz Jablonski could not find the money to shoot for seven years ^[2] .

The film was partially funded by the Russian Cinema Foundation ^[3] . The TV channels Canal + Polska and TVP , as well as Attack Film (Slovakia), Metrafilms (Russia) and Topkapi Films (Netherlands) took part in the creation of the film.

Initially, Pasikovsky wanted to name the film “ Kadish ” (Jewish memorial prayer) ^[4] .

In Poland, the film caused a heated discussion in society, which actually became a continuation of the debate around the book of Gross, but also touched on the topic of contemporary anti-Semitism raised in the film ^[4] . The right-wing Gazeta Polska called Spikelets "a false and harmful film for the Poles." Among those who supported Spikelets were Polish Minister of Culture Bohdan Zdroevsky and director Andrzej Wajda ^[2] .

Mikhail Trofimenkov notes the director’s ability to present a complex topic cleverly, but in an accessible language for the average person and sees the roots of the film in the American and later Polish tradition of Western , a common plot of which is the arrival of a lone hero in a small town whose inhabitants are connected by a dark secret; the closest, according to the critic, prototype is John Sturges ' Bad Day at Black Rock ^[5] . Andrei Plakhov , criticizing some inaccuracy of the image of Jozef and the “questionable in terms of taste” ending in which Jozef is crucified, nevertheless called “Spikelets” one of the most important films of the year ^[6] .

Maciej Štur received the Polish national film award for Best Actor, and the film received another award for the production designer and several other nominations, including “Best Film”.

In 2013, at the Jerusalem International Film Festival, the film received the Yad Vashem Institute Award.

• Melamed Yu. There is no good movie about the Holocaust (neopr.) . jewish.ru . FEOR (11/15/2013). Date of treatment September 7, 2014.