A propaganda film which was to serve as a kind of counterbalance to the works of the Polish Film School.
The work received the FIPRESCI Award at the Mar Del Plata Festival.
One of the first pictures directed by Jerzy Passendorfer, a war cinema specialist, best known for his TV series “Janosik”.
An adaptation of Roman Bratny’s novel “Szczęśliwi torturowani”, a symbolic epilogue to the writer’s most famous work and legendary novel “Kolumbowie rocznik 20” about the so-called Generation of Columbuses, i.e. young people whose adolescence was marked by the tragic events of World War II.
Jerzy, “Siwy”, a former Home Army soldier, currently living in France, comes to Warsaw. The man looks for friends from the times of the occupation, his former commander, and above all, Ina, a woman he once loved. He is shocked to see the rebuilt Warsaw and daily life of its residents. The next meetings bring him even more disappointments. His old friends have managed to settle in in the communist reality, start families and come to terms with the past. The attitude represented by “Siwy”, who still lives in the past, seems to make no sense to them. The man gradually realizes that there is no place for him in the new Poland.
Originally, the film was to be called “Powrót Kolumba” (“The Return of Columbus”), thus referring directly to Bratny’s novel and its main character, Columbus, who after the end of World War II opts for emigration. In his memories of the foreign occupation one of the characters makes a clear reference to the assassination of Franz Kutschera, an operation of the Home Army which became the theme of the film “Zamach”, made by Jerzy Passendorfer two years earlier.
