02. May 2012

A triumph of humanity

There are films whose arthouse style leaves cinemagoers enthusiastic. There are others whose merciless truth pierces viewers to the heart. And again others that will forever leave their traces in the souls of the shaken audience.

In Darkness, the new film by director Agnieszka Holland, is all of those. The film tells a true story: it is about the fate of a group of Jews that was hidden by a Polish sewerage worker and his family in the sewer tunnels of Lwow for over a year (in the period from the enclosure of the ghetto until its liberation). While this story, told by a survivor after the end of the war, has a happy ending, it leaves the audience appalled, in speechless astonishment about the fact that anything like this could have happened at all. Holland shows true mastery: she is not striving to impress with easy effects, she does not play with emotions, does not show off any directorial tricks. She rather concentrates on people who were forced to resist the Holocaust – each of them as best they could, without any heroism or hysteria, even those who were close to despair; men, women, children, of different religious affiliations, both courageous and anxious.

In Darkness tells about a triumph of humanity – a cinematic milestone.