| Polish master Wajda delights at Oscar pick for WWII-era film Acclaimed Polish director Andrzej Wajda Tuesday said he was delighted at the Oscar nomination for his movie "Katyn," recounting the 1940 Soviet slaying of thousands of Polish soldiers, including his father."I'm extremely happy that such a subject has been well received," Wajda, 81, told reporters after learning he was in the running."Some said that it wasn't worth delving into history any more. Well it was worth it," he said.
"Katyn" was one of five films to receive an Academy Awards nomination in the best foreign film category.
It takes its title from the forest in the former Soviet Union where many of the 22,500 Polish army officers captured by the Red Army were massacred during World War II.
The film is primarily fictional, but the fact that it is based on real events adds to its emotional pull, Wajda said.
It also uses archive material shot by both the Nazi Germans and Soviet authorities.
Much of the film is set in the southern Polish city of Krakow between 1939 and 1950, and tells the story of the agonising wait of local women for news of their loved ones.
Wajda's father, Captain Jakub Wajda, was one of the victims of the killings, making the movie a deeply personal affair for the director, who himself fought in the Polish resistance and began his film career in 1950.
The massacre at Katyn and a swathe of other sites came in the wake of Moscow's deal with Nazi Germany to invade and carve up Poland, in 1939.The Polish officers captured by the Red Army were deemed anti-communist "counterrevolutionaries" and picked out to be killed by the Soviet NKVD secret police.
The episode remained obscured for a long time, even when the Nazis revealed the existence of the mass graves they discovered in 1941 after they invaded the Soviet Union.
Moscow blamed the Germans for the massacre, and the West remained silent so as not to antagonise the Soviet Union, then a valuable ally in the fight against Hitler.
The subject remained taboo in post-war Poland, which was part of the communist bloc until 1989.It was only in 1990 that then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admitted his country's responsibility.
"Russian cinema-goers will be surprised to discover things which were covered up or airbrushed from their history," Wajda said. However, he said he was pleased that the film has not stirred anti-Russian feeling in Poland since its release last September -- on the anniversary of the 1939 Soviet invasion.
"Katyn" is considered a serious contender for an Oscar. It competitors include Kazakhstan's entry "Mongol," which tells the epic story of the early life of warrior-leader Genghis Khan, and Russia's "12," about a jury deliberating its verdict on a Chechen boy accused of murdering his stepfather.
The other nominees are Israel's "Beaufort," about Israeli soldiers based in Lebanon as they prepare to withdraw, and Austria's "The Counterfeiters," a drama based on a Nazi-led counterfeiting operation in the 1930s.
Wajda noted that all five films have a violent, military or historical flavour. "Maybe people are afraid of a latent conflict in some unexpected part of the globe. Maybe film directors have a premonition," he said.
Wajda has been an unsuccessful Oscar nominee three times, earning picks in 1976 for "Ziemia obiecana" (The Promised Land), in 1979 for "Panny z Wilka" (The Maids of Wilko) and in 1982 for "Czlowiek z zelaza" (Man of Iron).He won an honorary Oscar in 2000 in recognition of five decades of film-making.
Katyn-Wajda, AFP
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