Review by mpadjasek

I decided to watch "Wezwanie" (The Summons) partly because the main role in this film was played by the recently deceased outstanding actress Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak. However, I was a bit surprised that this modest film turned out to be much better than I expected. It tells the true story of a wrongly accused emergency doctor, which happened in Warsaw in 1983. She was accused of assaulting and stealing the wallet of a drunk patient. The allegations were completely false and motivated by the authorities' hate campaign against emergency workers. I didn't know this story, and that's why it was doubly interesting to me. The film is both an indictment of the authoritarian state and a parable with something Kafkaesque in it. It also shows the atmosphere of the 1980s when Poles fought for democracy and that it was worth fighting for a better tomorrow because today we live in a completely different country. An additional attraction for me was that I could see what some of the actors who are popular today looked like 30 years ago. The biggest surprise for me was that this story is universal and still relevant today. Today, populist right-wing movements also use hate campaigns to make individual people and entire social groups look bad to society. In today's Poland, this is primarily the populist Law and Justice party (PiS) with its hate campaign against immigrants, Germans, homosexuals, doctors, and judges. Although anti-communist rhetoric is used, the methods used are straight from an authoritarian system, and similar methods of operation can probably also be found in countries other than Poland. So, "Wezwanie" was an interesting and valuable film for me in many ways.