Starring Andrzej Chyra and Stanislawa Celinska. In Polish with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Friday to Thursday, July 17 to 23, at the Vancity Theatre

In the 1950s, Andrzej Wajda established his international reputation with a series of motion pictures dealing with Poland’s role in the Second World War, but he would never have been allowed to tell this particular story in those politically chilly days. To be sure, in Kanal, there were oblique references to Moscow’s suspicious refusal to help the Polish home army during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, but this relatively restrained criticism was light years away from accusing the NKVD of the wholesale massacre of the Polish officer corps in the spring of 1940, a crime that was then attributed to the Third Reich and chronologically situated in the fall of 1941.

The fact that everyone knew that this was one mass murder the Nazis did not commit meant nothing; the official lie had to be maintained at all costs.

Considering the volatility of his material, Wajda’s approach is remarkably restrained. To begin with, Wajda pegs the number of murdered officers and NCOs at 12,000 (die-hard Stalinist apologists suggest a mere 6,000 victims, while militant anti-Communists prefer the probably inflated figure of 45,000). As for the political perspective, it is anything but politically overdetermined, since the large cast of characters includes sympathetic Russian spooks, heroic aristocratic widows, and well-intentioned people whose willingness to either resist or assist the new regime is motivated by equally patriotic reasons.

Although Katyn’s production values are excellent in every way, particular praise must be lavished on Pawel Edelman’s extraordinarily evocative cinematography. Offhand, I can’t think of the last time a mainstream movie employed camera moves so effectively. If Katyn is all about seeing the truth, then Edelman makes it possible for us to do just that.