Winter of the Crow

In a sort of perverse “cat and mouse” game, the British psychiatrist and professor Joan Andrews, a guest lecturer at the University of Warsaw, is involved and snared in the events of a nightmarish 1981 in Poland. With the rest of the country, the capital – a dangerous labyrinth – wakes up on the morning of 13 December oppressed by martial law.

COMMENTARY
Kasia Adamik adapts a short story by Olga Tokarczuk and builds a thriller in which the memory of Hitchcock’s The Torn Curtain sometimes surfaces. The masterfully built suspense goes hand in hand with the precise reconstruction of an era whose wounds have never properly healed, and a universal reflection upon commitment and the need to take position.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
Many years have gone by since I first read Tokarczuk and was irremediably attracted by Professor Andrews – or better yet, in the book, by the professor. However, Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel and talent aside, the story moved something personal in me. Shortly before leaving Poland as a child, in 1982, at the height of the regime, I lived in a small town on the outskirts of Warsaw. Later, in Paris, I dreamed of its grey concrete labyrinths, the mud and snow in that no man’s land: daydreams in which I liked to lose myself, searching for the road home perhaps, wandering about a deconstructed city that still feels foreign to me today… as it does for Professor Andrews.