IS AFTERMATH FOLLOWED BY ACCOUNTABILITY?
One day in the year 2000 Frantisek Kalina (played by Ireneusz Czop) goes from Chicago to see his brother Józef (Maciej Stuhr) in a rural part of Poland, which he left in 1980. Józef’s wife and children have recently fled the country, but Józef inexplicably stays to continue wheat farming. Frantisek demands to know why his brother’s family split up, but Józef refuses to answer. What then emerges, a story based on true events, is that his brother has been assembling a cemetery consisting of gravestones of Jews that had been scattered around the countryside near the town of Jedwabne. Obviously the Jews do not now live in the area, so the question is who, what, when, how, and why. The townspeople, aware of his unwelcome self-appointed task, attack Józef physically, burn his fields, and put graffiti around his house with Jewish symbols, though the Kalina family is not Jewish. At this point in the film, most of the audience will surmise that something happened as a result of the Nazi conquest of Poland, but spoilers prevent this reviewer from laying out the grim story, which comes out through Frantisek’s interviews of elderly persons and digging around the family’s former abode with his brother. The Political Film Society has nominated Aftermath, directed by Wladislaw Pasikowski, as best film exposé of 2013. The reconstructed tale has sparked controversy anew within Poland. MH