Heweliusz

A heart-breaking true story of a devastating catastrophe involving a Polish ferry. You can literally feel the events and hopelessness crawling on your skin - nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, only death. Four minutes before sinking. Beautifully shot, with sombre colours and wonderful acting, it is one of the greatest productions on Netflix. I strongly recommend it.

Having worked in short sea shipping in Greece for almost 20 years always in Accounting, I feel for all the characters in the series. The acting is excellent - note in the first minutes the reaction of the captain on leave to to the news on the telephone. There are some glitches of course but on the whole it's a very good series.

I wonder why no tv series has been done on the Samina catastrophe. The answer is abvious if you watch Heweliusz carefully.

The cinematography of the series gives an impression similar to Kieslowski's Dekalog. That might be why I particularly liked it. The story is real and truly extraordinary. The way the case was depicted, along with the performances of the cast, was genuinely impressive.

However, I could say that if the story had been presented in a more artistic way, its impact would have been even stronger. The series has all the essential elements: an accident, a court case, devastated families, guilt, threats, and deep sorrow. But perhaps that is also the series' limitation. It seems that the director and the screenwriter were so overwhelmed by the weight of the real story that they could not fully focus on the artistic elements that could have elevated it further.

There are also many sub-stories, and harmonizing all of them is not easy. Still, I liked Heweliusz very much, and I recommend watching it.

As a former merchant mariner (deck officer in the commercial fleet) watching this series was a very personal and emotional experience for me.

Scenes picturing the catastrophe, it's dynamic, fatal chain reaction of events in a dramatically short time made me literally cry.

Stories of the real-life people who lost their relatives, mixed with stories of the survivors and those who were involved in the events are developing in a pace that won't let You stop watching.

A masterpiece.

I found this series absolutely riveting and it thoroughly deserves the high ratings delivered so far. The casting, production and filming are pretty much faultless but if I had to make a criticism it's that there was no need to introduce fabricated events to enhance the story imo.

There's enough material in the lead up, the accident and the aftermath to keep this a true account of the entire incident.

I'll watch it again at some point as it's that good.