Get Out This Weekend: 17th Annual Polish Film Festival

The most interesting documentary promises to be Commandant Edelman (on a double-bill with Zietek Sunday afternoon). Marek Edelman is perhaps the definitive Polish-Jewish figure of the second half of the 20th century. One of the few surviving leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Edelman went on to become a well-known cardiologist in Lodz after the war, eventually joining the anti-communist Solidarity movement in the 1980s. In the 1980s, Hanna Krall, one of Poland's leading journalists, wrote a fantastic new journalism-style biography of Edelman (one of the single finest books about the Holocaust you could find--everyone should read this book) called Shielding the Flame. In it, amongst dozens of other unforgettable scenes, she recounts sitting with quietly self-satisfied Edelman at his house in 1983, on the fortieth anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising. Martial law having been declared in an attempt to suppress Solidarity, Edelman--theoretically subject to official state honors--was under house arrest, and the guests hadn't been able to enter. Forty years after surviving the Holocaust and helping lead a ragtag band of insurgents who, trapped in the decimated ghetto, managed to hold off the Nazis for nearly four weeks, Edelman continued fighting for what was right. The showing this Sunday, April 19, as it happens, coincides with the 65th anniversary of the beginning of the uprising.

And on Saturday at 1:30, there will be a screening of five short films, including the visually arresting Birdy. More information about the films is available from the official festival website here.