Release calendarTop 250 moviesMost popular moviesBrowse movies by genreTop box officeShowtimes & ticketsMovie newsIndia movie spotlight
    What's on TV & streamingTop 250 TV showsMost popular TV showsBrowse TV shows by genreTV news
    What to watchLatest trailersIMDb OriginalsIMDb PicksIMDb SpotlightFamily entertainment guideIMDb Podcasts
    OscarsEmmysToronto Int'l Film FestivalHispanic Heritage MonthIMDb Stars to WatchSTARmeter AwardsAwards CentralFestival CentralAll events
    Born todayMost popular celebsCelebrity news
    Help centerContributor zonePolls
For industry professionals
  • Language
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
Watchlist
Sign in
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
Use app
Dekalog
S1.E8
All episodesAll
  • Cast & crew
  • User reviews
  • Trivia
IMDbPro

Dekalog, osiem

  • Episode aired Jun 22, 1990
  • TV-MA
  • 56m
IMDb RATING
7.5/10
3.9K
YOUR RATING
Teresa Marczewska in Dekalog (1989)
Drama

A researcher meets a professor and reveals herself as the child to whom she refused to shelter during World War II.A researcher meets a professor and reveals herself as the child to whom she refused to shelter during World War II.A researcher meets a professor and reveals herself as the child to whom she refused to shelter during World War II.

  • Director
    • Krzysztof Kieslowski
  • Writers
    • Krzysztof Piesiewicz
    • Krzysztof Kieslowski
  • Stars
    • Maria Koscialkowska
    • Teresa Marczewska
    • Artur Barcis
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.5/10
    3.9K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Krzysztof Kieslowski
    • Writers
      • Krzysztof Piesiewicz
      • Krzysztof Kieslowski
    • Stars
      • Maria Koscialkowska
      • Teresa Marczewska
      • Artur Barcis
    • 13User reviews
    • 17Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • Photos24

    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    + 18
    View Poster

    Top cast18

    Edit
    Maria Koscialkowska
    • Zofia
    Teresa Marczewska
    Teresa Marczewska
    • Elzbieta
    Artur Barcis
    Artur Barcis
    • Young Man
    Tadeusz Lomnicki
    Tadeusz Lomnicki
    • Tailor
    Marian Opania
    Marian Opania
    • Dean
    Bronislaw Pawlik
    Bronislaw Pawlik
    • Philatelist
    Wojciech Asinski
    • Student
    Marek Kepinski
    Marek Kepinski
    • Tenement Resident
    Janusz Mond
    Krzysztof Rojek
    Krzysztof Rojek
    • Rubber Man
    Wojciech Sanejko
    Ewa Skibinska
    Ewa Skibinska
    • Student
    Wojciech Starostecki
    Wojciech Starostecki
    • Student
    Jerzy Schejbal
    Jerzy Schejbal
    • Ksiadz
    • (credit only)
    Jacek Strzemzalski
    • Tenement House Caretaker
    Hanna Szczerkowska
    Anna Zagórska
    • Student
    Marek Kasprzyk
    Marek Kasprzyk
    • Student
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Krzysztof Kieslowski
    • Writers
      • Krzysztof Piesiewicz
      • Krzysztof Kieslowski
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews13

    7.53.9K
    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
    7
    8
    9
    10

    Featured reviews

    10FilmCriticLalitRao

    What a shame ! ! ! Mysterious are the vagaries of human mind.

    Dekalog 8: "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness" is a short film which will surely move any human being with heart to tears.By making this film,one of the greatest masters of Polish cinema Kieslowski has given birth to a highly mature work of art which needs to be seen at regular intervals to fathom the true meaning of human existence found in human heart.One can learn that there is no yardstick by which greatness or wickedness of an individual,a society,a nation or a religion can be measured.Everybody has reasons to accept or decline a good action."Dekalog,Osiem" suggests that individual sense prevails sometimes over a good act.Rules have to be broken on some occasions to save precious,human lives.It is a human instinct that old memories cannot be separated from human soul.This is the reason why old memories induce people to visit places where they could have died,see a house where they were hidden,meet a person who saved a life.This short film is remarkable for its depiction of young Polish university students.It is a good sign that young generation have been shown as interested in tackling ethical and moral questions.It is hard to say whether Kieslowski had ideas about the liberation of communist Poland in his mind when he was making this film.
    10sfuss

    Simple and Terrific

    With a minimum of histrionics, this film tells a simple story about the legacy of the holocaust in Poland.

    A college professor who once turned away a little Jewish girl who sought refuge is confronted by that same girl -- now in her forties -- and must explain to her the real reason for turning her away. While the two women are able to forge a deep friendship, the man (a tailor) who risked his life to try and save the girl has become, with time, too closed off to allow her to form any sort of bond with him. The film's last image, of the lonely tailor looking out the window of his shop to see the professor and her friend laughing together, has the same straight forward and unassuming emotional wallop that ends many of Kieslowski's films.

    This may be the best fictional film ever made about the holocaust.
    10Aquilant

    A woman haunted by the memories of her unhappy childhood.

    Dekalog 8 introduces a debate about a situation described in the second episode of the series, with regard to some interesting researches about thematic morals made in an unadorned lecture hall. As in a game of mirrors, Kieslowski's magical poetry proposes subtle allusions, references, previous solutions analysed under different points of view.

    The analysis of Elzbieta's personal story framed within the context of her restless past and recalled in the light of her present time made of painful and unavoidable confrontations proposes the harassing thought about our duty to God, about our moral obligations towards the Christian commandment, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour". Is it possible to be merciful to our fellowmen even at the risk of violating the dictates of divine commandments? Are we allowed to help people even if we are aware about the incompatibility between the ethical principles applied to the evidences of religion and the intention of "bearing false witness against our neighbour" to a good purpose? Is it really possible to give up the idea of getting out of the clutches of the Nazi police a six-year-old Jewish child in the desperate need of a certificate of baptism only on account of moral and religious scruples? The dramatic explanation between Elzbieta, haunted by the memories of her unhappy childhood, and Zofia, the elder woman who refused to give her a passport to safety many years ago, call to our minds a sense of bewilderment and affliction.

    Both of them are afraid of something going up in smoke around them and nothing escapes their remembrances of a painful past. Sad remembrances of course, because nothing hurts like the truth. Crude in the same manner as a vivisection of the soul. Conjured up with surgical precision in the coldness of an utterly impersonal ambient. Maybe only a cathartic face to face between the two women would give life to new friendly relations made of comprehension, explanations, reconciliations. Kieslowski divides all humanity into two parts: the saviors and the saved. His strict dialectics traces all the uneven steps of the story in a very subtle way. He likes to give back to human dignity its state of primitive and natural innocence, deeply upset by a pressing sense of misinterpreted obedience to the precepts of the Church.
    chaos-rampant

    Dekalog 8

    This is not a particularly remarkable Dekalog. But it's simple and lays out as clearly as any of them the blueprint that Kieslowski worked towards, both in these 10 Dekalogs, the longer short films, and it remains to be seen I guess if he perfects and evolves this for the color trilogy.

    The twofold blueprint is that we have a world and a story that takes place. The world across the 10 Dekalogs is the same few months in the life of an apartment block, ostensibly the same few months the show aired. Here for example we have the story of Dekalog 2 with the dying husband laid through as something that happened in the same neighborhood.

    Anyway this world is open-ended and ebbs forward and back with what the protagonists have set in motion around them. The most interesting thing about Dekalog is Kieslowski's ability, snippets of it in TV form, to render that visually as movements in emotional air.

    The story each time focuses on a moral issue, here it's guilt, tied to the Polish experience of WWII and how it reverberates still. But time and again the story is reduced to two characters forlornly baring themselves to each other in a room, explaining or avoiding to. Bergman.

    Here we have it clearly: the notion (during a class on ethics) of stories where readers (viewers) have to surmise the motivation of characters.

    One of these viewers inside the class begins narrating her own story that begs for ethical interpretation: a Jewish girl in need of shelter from Nazi horror who was turned away from a Catholic Polish home.

    Kieslowski attempts to visually inhabit a corner of this story (no more is allowed by the TV format): the old woman returns to the same WWII home where the story took place, the girl is lost and she looks for her distraught. She was the protagonist in that story, now inhabiting the memory of it.

    Then we are back in a room where we have a deeper story that explains the former, giving us a plausible ethics that explain what seemed like wrongdoing at the time. This is the same Dekalog effort of setting up a story that they try to deepen later on with more complicated morals.

    The idea is that we leave these Dekalogs with some insight into the destructiveness of what it means to inhabit a story (the Jewish girl carried that story of wrongdoing with her for 40 years) as well as some measure of realization about the complexity of inter-dependence forces at work behind the stories.

    But this is too clear, a template on how to write rather than a poem.
    tedg

    False

    Everyone, and I mean everyone who is alive, should spend some time with Kieslowski. And to do it right, you need to spend time with these ten experiments.

    Yes, they are experiments and they are important to the history of cinematic imagination.

    They are all cowritten. The writing partner sets a knot, a dramatic tangle. Kieslowski then enters this scribble and adds cinematic reality in two ways. The first is simply the cinematic platform of storytelling. The second are a set of cinematic elaborations. Its this second bit that makes him so exciting.

    They're what I call cinematic folds, but because this is the short form (the movie equivalent of short stories) they only have to be suggested. Taken together, the collection of ten short films is a few hundred loose fishooks, many of which catch you unawares.

    In his "colors" work he folds these back in his long form experiments.

    To make this a real experience for us and him, he does most of his work after the project begins filming. And to up the ante, for each of these ten he uses a different creative crew. So you would expect some of these ten to be more adventurous and successful than others.

    This is the case. This is the least successful of them so far.

    The value, at least to me, in these is how much Kieslowski there is compared to Piesiewicz. The more of Kieslowski's visual improvisation, the better. This has very little. Blunt viewers will still enjoy the story, which is interesting as such things go. But there's little of the master here. Must have been a time of rest.

    Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

    Related interests

    Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight (2016)
    Drama

    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      All entries contain spoilers

    Top picks

    Sign in to rate and Watchlist for personalized recommendations
    Sign in

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • June 22, 1990 (Poland)
    • Countries of origin
      • Poland
      • West Germany
    • Language
      • Polish
    • Filming locations
      • Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland
    • Production companies
      • Telewizja Polska (TVP)
      • Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Warszawa)
      • Sender Freies Berlin (SFB)
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      • 56m
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Mono
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.33 : 1

    Contribute to this page

    Suggest an edit or add missing content
    • Learn more about contributing
    Edit page

    More to explore

    Recently viewed

    Please enable browser cookies to use this feature. Learn more.
    Get the IMDb App
    Sign in for more accessSign in for more access
    Follow IMDb on social
    Get the IMDb App
    For Android and iOS
    Get the IMDb App
    • Help
    • Site Index
    • IMDbPro
    • Box Office Mojo
    • License IMDb Data
    • Press Room
    • Advertising
    • Jobs
    • Conditions of Use
    • Privacy Policy
    • Your Ads Privacy Choices
    IMDb, an Amazon company

    © 1990-2025 by IMDb.com, Inc.