“[Krzysztof Zanussi] tried to convince me that filmmaking was a job like any other. What about emotions, I’d ask him? Emotion is a wasteful secretion of adrenaline, he’d say, and then we’d go our own ways.”—MACIEJ DRYGAS
“When I first saw Rat Catcher, I felt as if someone were toying with my feelings and my desire for justice.”—Polish film critic TADEUSZ SOBOLEWSKI
“History is written by the victors” goes a common say- ing. In the case of the story told in Maciej Drygas’s Hear My Cry, the saying nearly came true. Here are the facts: in 1969, a young student set himself on fire in the busy Wenceslas Square to protest the Eastern Bloc’s invasion of Prague. That act of aggression ended a brief period of political thaw and the hopes for meaningful reforms. The student’s name was Jan Palach, and his death set shock waves through Czechoslovakia, even though the local authorities framed his self-sacrifice as the act of a lone madman. Recently, Palach’s protest was the basis for Burning Bush, a comprehensive miniseries and film based on a Czech script and directed by Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland. All this is a postscript for Drygas’s film, for in September 1968, shortly after the invasion, another man, a Pole, set himself on fire in Warsaw. He did it during harvest festivities, in a crowded stadium with dancers in folk costumes and Communist Party digni- taries. Some 100,000 people attended the fete, which was televised live. The Pole’s name was Ryszard Siwiec. When Drygas read of his immolation some twenty years later in a newspaper article that linked Palach and Siwiec, he was certain that his older colleagues would have heard of him. No one had. And so, in 1990, not long after the first democratic elections in Poland in nearly
five decades, Drygas set out to fill a gap in his country’s history. Drygas likes to think of himself as an investigative bloodhound with a knack for digging up obscure archi- val materials. When preparing State of Weightlessness, his film about the space race, he persuaded Russian authori- ties to lead him to a basement full of unopened boxes containing unseen footage of Soviet space missions. As he was documenting Hear My Cry, Drygas heard that the secret service had had their own camera at the stadium, and so a visual trace of Siwiec should have survived. Hundreds of sources later, he had not laid an eye on a sliver of film showing Siwiec—until one day, a television- archive staffer casually handed Drygas a tape from a rejects pile. Drygas found Siwiec, his holy grail. The mate- rial was badly damaged, but there was one other prob- lem: The clip was only seven seconds long. What Drygas did with this pithy black-and-white
strip of celluloid was to find a cinematic equivalent of a tormented thought that spirals into obsession. He seg- mented and stretched time, making each second count. The film opens with an image of burning stacks of paper, a representation of a real bonfire that Drygas witnessed in front of the secret service headquarters when, shortly after the regime’s fall, officers destroyed evidence. The
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