DOZING:

'The bloodshed had to be shown': At 80, Andrzej Wajda has made the bravest film of his career: a graphic account of the killing of 8,000 Polish officers. He tells Geoffrey Macnab why the story meant so much to him (Geoffrey Macnab, May 2, 2008, Guardian)

Whatever else it is, Katyn is bravura film-making. Wajda is in his 80s, but he hasn't lost his knack for marshalling crowds, choreographing elaborate set-pieces, staging chases and cranking up the emotions. The massacre itself is shot in brutal but haunting fashion. Officer after officer is bundled out of Soviet trucks, shot in the back of the head and left to topple forward into a pit.

Wajda doesn't shrink at showing the sheer scale of the slaughter. What makes the sequences all the more chilling is the lack of emotion of the Soviet assassins. Their faces are blank as they pull the trigger. The Poles try to utter the Lord's Prayer when they realise they are doomed, but none has time to get beyond a line or two. Then, as huge lines of corpses lie bleeding in the mud, a bulldozer pushes earth on top of them.

Wajda researched the killing scenes as thoroughly as he could, poring over diaries of the slaughtered officers as well as newsreel footage and official records. "First of all, I decided the massacre must be a part of the film," he says. "Although people knew that these soldiers and intelligentsia were brutally murdered, and could imagine how they were murdered, I still decided that the bloodshed had to be shown. The way the victims were killed was easy to find out after the graves were discovered in 1943."