Two brothers (Maciej Stuhr and Ireneusz Czop) uncover their village’s dirty little secret in controversial AFTERMATH
AFTERMATH (Władysław Pasikowski, 2013)
Cinema Village, 22 East 12th St., 212-924-3363
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway, 212-757-2280
Opens Friday, November 1
www.menemshafilms.com
Polish writer-director Władysław Pasikowski digs up a deeply disturbing and controversial part of his country’s past in the gripping drama Aftermath. When Franek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop), who left his family’s small farming village twenty years earlier, in 1980, comes home to spend the summer helping out his brother, Józek (Maciej Stuhr), he is surprised to find that his younger sibling has become a hated outcast. It turns out that Józek has been uncovering Jewish gravestones, which the townspeople and even the church have been using to pave roads and for various other architectural purposes. He’s been gathering them in the middle of his wheat field, building a cemetery that has outraged the villagers. They become even angrier — and more dangerous — when Franek, who, like his brother, has never before shown any sympathy for the Jews, starts investigating what really happened there sixty years ago, a dark, dirty secret that everyone else is determined will remain buried. In Aftermath, Pasikowski (Kroll, Pigs) adds horror-genre tropes to a Holocaust tale not seen on film before while evoking such wide-ranging fiction and nonfiction works as Marian Marzynski’s Shtetl, Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, and Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist. Aftermath is a thriller that is not so much about good and evil but about guilt, responsibility, and the choices people make, and then have to live with. Inspired by a true story documented by historian Jan T. Gross in Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, which stirred up major controversy when it was published in 2000, Aftermath has led to a heated polemic battle between the right and the left in Poland, as well as death threats against Stuhr, who was named Best Actor by the Polish Film Academy for his portrayal of the conflicted Józek. An important, well-made film that is able to avoid being swallowed by the swirling debate surrounding it, Aftermath opens November 1 at Lincoln Plaza and Cinema Village.