THE DARK HOUSE

In the midst of the martial law era, one winter day a group of policemen end up by chance in an isolated building out in the middle of nowhere, the site of a murder which occurred several years before, one that has remained unprosecuted and now demands investigation in the form of a video reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding the crime. But what really happened back then is not the only thing that subsequently comes to light – in discreet one-on-one situations, circumstances lurking under the surface within the state police also get laid out on the symbolic table. The officer’s camera only captures the true film here peripherally. Corruption as conditio humana – ironically sine qua non – represents an artistic obsession for Wojciech Smarzowski, the Dominik Graf of Poland, whose work enjoys fierce popularity in his native land, although it remains largely undiscovered abroad.