Katyn

I must have seen several thousand movies in my life, but never has one left me shattered as Katyn did. (Full disclosure: years ago I knew a Polish family caught up in the events of September 1939, so I was ripe to be blown away by the opening minutes of the film ... never mind its ending.) If Katyn--the film and the massacre--has a moral, the moral is this: It's not over when it's over. The shockwaves go on for years, decades, generations. And perhaps this: the crime wasn't the murder of thousands of Polish officers and sergeants by the Russians, who wanted to clear the way for their takeover of Poland. The crime was Poland's half-century of captivity, from 1939 to 1989.

Still, it was the Poles who won in the end. They made this magnificent film. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford