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Calgary Herald (22/Nov/1990) - Suppression failed to control controversial movie

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Suppression failed to control controversial movie

Writer-director Richard Bugajski's best-known film was banned for seven years in his native Poland, but by the time it was finally released, most of the premiere audience had already seen it anyway.

Interrogation, which opens in Calgary today at the Plaza theatre, is a harrowing drama about political repression in the Stalin era.

It was shot in 1981 during the brief easing of totalitarian control as the Solidarity movement gained power in Poland. Martial law was declared before it was ready to be shown, however, and the Ministry of Culture locked the negative and prints away as inflammatory "anti-socialistic" material.

But the ministry hadn't counted on videotape. Over the years cassettes of Interrogation that Bugajski had made before the film was seized were copied and re-copied and circulated widely throughout Poland's cultural underground.

When at long last the film had its official premiere on Dec. 13, 1989 — the eighth anniversary of the declaration of martial law — the only novelty for most of the guests was being able to see it in full color on a big screen.

"The video quality of the copies of copies of copies that people had made was so poor it looked as if the film had been shot in black and white," Bugajski said in a telephone interview from Toronto, where he has lived since 1985.

Interrogation tells the story of Tonia, an apolitical Warsaw cabaret singer who is arrested in the early 1950s for no apparent reason and is subjected for five years to imprisonment and torture.

Bugajski first wrote Interrogation as a novel, basing it on conversations with a number of women who had experiences like Tonia's. Some are still paying a terrible price in psychological after-effects.

"One was able to live a normal life after she was set free, but another is still paranoid about the police and about performing," he said.

When Interrogation was banned, Bugajski found himself out of work. He continued to speak his mind, however, and gave interviews to American magazines and newspapers; in 1985 he was ordered out of Poland, and he emigrated to Canada with his family.

Since then he has worked regularly, directing episodes of TV series like Saying Goodbye, The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents; he has also taught film courses at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.

He recognizes the special problems faced by Canadian films because of our proximity to the U.S., but he doesn't believe measures like a quota system would solve them.

"I'm against protection," he said.

"That's what Poland was all about. I believe in a free market, in free access — if people don't come to see my film, it's my fault, not theirs."

Bugajski returned to Poland last year for the premiere of Interrogation and didn't like the political climate he found there.

"There's bad blood, and anti-Semitism is showing up again — even though there are only 5,000 Jews left in Poland," he said.

"It's not a country I would like to go back to."

He has just finished shooting his first feature film since Interrogation and the first he has directed in Canada.

Clear Cut, adapted from M. T. Kelly's 1987 Governor-General's Award-winning novel A Dream Like Mine, is about a native Indian who kidnaps two white men in a desperate effort to fight logging interests in northern Ontario. Bugajski describes it as violent, complex and controversial.

At present, he is looking for scripts. ""In Canada I'm going to have to be more specialized, to function more as a director than a writer,"" he said.

""In Poland I could afford to spend six months writing a screenplay. Here I have to look for work — it's a different situation.""

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