Austeria

Awarded the Golden Lions at the Polish Film Festival in Gdańsk 1984.

Film by  Jerzy Kawalerowicz, the winner of 2007 Gdynia Film Festival Platinum Lions lifetime achievement award. The long time director of Kadr Film Studio and the founder and first president of the Polish Filmmakers Association.

A film adaptation of Julian Stryjkowski’s novel „Austeria”.

1914 – the first day of the Great War. Galician Jews, terrified by the war and incoming Cossacks  make a dramatic escape of. A group of Hasidic Jews with families and refugees
from the city arrive at the inn where old Tag lives fearing a pogrom. Inside the inn, violent political discussion are conducted and the Hasidics pray through ecstatic dance and chanting. The Cossacks set fire to the town and approach the Inn. At dawn the Hasidics run to the river
to bathe in the clean water. They die gunned down. The film was directed with awareness of the tragedy of the Holocaust. The massacre of the Hasidics during their ritual bathe ritually is the foretold metaphoric destruction of the Jewish nation. A depiction of a dying world.