Photo from the reelwork.org website

Reelwork website

1951 Release:

In Darkness, a film by Agnieszka Holland
Reviewed by David H. Anthony

Agnieszka Hollands acclaimed Polish film. In Darkness powerfully forces viewers to confront a range of difficult historical realities.  It is a harrowing holocaust memoir based upon an actual series of events within which Jews fleeing Nazi liquidation of the Lvov ghetto have as their only survival alternative refuge in a municipal sewer. (Review continues below)

In Darkness instantly plunges audience members into several levels of penumbral conundra. First it is multi ethnic and multilingual. Various sequences include dialogue in Polish, German, Yiddish and Ukrainian, highlighting the complexity of the lingual landscape even among people who outsiders imagine to be homogeneous. This reflects Lvov itself, a contested space for centuries.

The story line revolves around Leopold Socha, a sewer worker, and the circumstances through which he is convinced to become party to an arrangement whereby a group of Jews fleeing for their lives agree to pay him to be allowed to hide in his sewer in Nazi-occupied Lvov. This looks precisely as one might imagine. One of the immediate challenges, the filmmaker tells us, is achieving verisimilitude since few know the inside of a sewer.  The relationships that develop in these environs alternate between the best and worst that life has to offer, like existence itself.  Socha is taking a tremendous personal risk which could well end in his own very execution should he be discovered, and that threat always hangs over his head.

It is striking how many stories are yet to emerge from such a bleak time in human history.  One thinks if you can imagine it, someone experienced it. There is no limit, it seems, to the types  or extremes of strategies people had to or indeed still have to resort to in order to preserve their lives and those of others. Against impossible odds some still survive. For this reason contemplating the ordeal I was to witness even though “only” a movie, knowing  that this was true made it that much more harrowing.  In Darkness, then, is not a film to attend unless you are clear about what you are in for, and you are in for it.  On the other hand, there are limits to the blinders we can place around our vision or to our efforts to act deaf to others’ cries.

Yet it is often precisely in these moments when things seem their bleakest and most devoid of hope that somehow we find some affirmation of life to make it more than mere existence.  Of course most of us can only imagine the horrors of those places and times, as we can only imagine slavery, but with courage we need to be reminded of the fact that those who struggle to survive are connected to us in some way.  Most of us have a sense of this when crises strike. The question is, what will it take to notice that before the next genocidal episode, or to recognize those underway now?

For the KUSP Film Gang, this is David Anthony.

National Theatre Live website