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Polish movie In Darkness short-listed for Oscar

PR dla Zagranicy
Peter Gentle 24.01.2012 14:37
Film director Agnieszka Holland’s film In Darkness has been short-listed in the Best Foreign Language Film category at this year’s Oscars.

On
On the set of In Darkness in 2010. Photo: PAP/Grzegorz Michałowski

Based on the true story of Leopold Socha, a Polish sewer worker during the second world war, the film tells the true story of a group of Jews that hid for 14 months in the sewers beneath the then Nazi-occupied city of Lwow (today Lviv in Ukraine).

Shot in Polish, German, Yiddish and Ukrainian, Holland said that while a film made in English would likely reach a wider audience she wanted to make a Holocaust movie that was as faithful to the truth as possible.

The film is based on the book In the Sewers of Lvov [sic] by Robert Marshall, who was inspired by the memoirs of Ignacy Chiger, one of the Jewish survivors.

His daughter, Krystyna Chiger – an eight year-old in 1944 - described her ordeal in the book The Girl in the Green Sweater, published in 2008.

The movie, which premiered in Warsaw in the first week of January, is a joint Polish-German-Canadian production.

The favourite in the now 5-strong category is A Separation by Iranian director Asghar Fahadi.

The list of Oscar nominations also includes US-based Janusz Kamiński, the director of cinematography on Steven Spielberg’s ‘War Horse’, one of the nine films in the competition for the Best Movie Oscar. Kamiński has photographed all of Spielberg's movies since 1993's Schindler's List, with the exception of Jurassic Park.

Fifty three year-old Kamiński asked for political asylum in Austria after the imposition of martial law at the end of 1981 and soon went to the United States. He first worked in Chicago’s factories and attended the city’s Columbia College, before transferring to the prestigious Americal Film Institute AFI Conservatory. He made his debut as a cinematographer in 1989. In 2000 he completed his directorial debut with a supernatural thriller ‘Lost Souls’.

Janusz Kamiński has two Oscars to his credit, for black-and-white cinematography for Spielberg’s Schindler's List (1993) and for cinematography for Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998).

The Oscars take place on February 26.(mk/jh/nh/pg)

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