Viewed at the 2010 Polish film festival of Los Angeles. A very interesting picture here was Waldemar Krzystek's latest offering, "Little Moscow" ( Mała Moskwa) which takes up the still touchy subject of the stationing of Russian troops on Polish soil during the Cold War years, which amounted almost to a military occupation. The Little Moscow in question was a large Russian garrison near the city of Legnica which was totally off limits to the local Poles, therefore they called it "Mala Moskwa". Numerous scenes demonstrate the disdain the Russians had for their Polish "allies" and the hatred the Poles had for the Russians, knowing that they were covering up atrocities like the massacre of 18,000 Polish POWs in the Katryn forest by the KGB during WWII, and generally regarding Poland as an inferior puppet state. The focus of the story however, based in part on memories of stories told to the director during his youth, is the illicit love affair between the pregnant wife of a diffident long suffering Russian officer and a gallant handsome young Polish cadet. In a flash forward, after the fall of Communism, the now grey haired Russian returns with his grown up daughter some twenty years later to visit the grave of the mother she never knew. At the very end the aging Pole also makes a shadowy entrance and we suspect that he may actually have been her father.
This is a very carefully woven psychological study of four intertwined lives, and actor Leslaw Żurek, now just thirty, who played the Polish officer is one of the leading stars of the new generation of Polish actors. Mr. Żurek appeared in two other films shown here and was present at all screenings to field questions after each -- in fairly good if somewhat halting English! He is definitely an actor for Polish Film buffs to keep an eye on. Director Krzystek lives and works in Wrocław far from the major film scene in Warsaw. He makes few films but all are sharply observed and cleanly directed.. One of his best in the psychological study of a psychotic university professor entitled "Polska Smierc" or Death Polish Stye.
