El interrogatorio

Unlike the reviewer "carioca-6," I have never seen this film available in the U.S. for rent or sale in any video format. It is not available from Netflix as of early 2008. I have seen it only once, when I lived in Detroit. Living near the border, I could pick up some Canadian stations, and "The Interrogation" was shown probably in late 1991 on the old TVOntario series "Film International" hosted by Jay Scott. Nevertheless, so riveting was this film that I have never forgotten it. Within the first couple of minutes, the film establishes that Tonia is a young pretty blonde---she is a wife and mother but doesn't seem to take this role too seriously--who is apolitical (risky in Communist Poland) and mostly out to have a good time. Without warning or reason, the film plunges her into a Kafkaesque nightmare of arrest, interrogation, conviction and imprisonment. She loses her youth, her health, everything but her own inner resources, and as the outside world forgets her, she develops dignity and a will to survive. Still worth seeing, despite the collapse of the government under which it was made, as a character portrait and a study of man's inhumanity to (wo)man. There are places on Earth where this still goes on, and they are not so far away as we'd like to think.