ENCOUNTERS IN THE DARK

Dark were the years of Nazi terror, though darker still for Magdalena Novak were the years that followed. For as the Polish pianist passes through Eltheim on a concert tour – the place where she was forced to toil as a “foreign worker” – she begins to grasp a central truth: that she alone is interested in an unflinching reckoning with the past while her “employer” (and lover) at the time, the shoe manufacturer Steinlieb, is not. He for his part is still eager to make deals with the Nazis from back then (and now) ... Wanda Jakubowska – herself a survivor of the death camps – made film history in 1948 with her semi-documentary Holocaust drama OSTATNI ETAP / THE LAST STAGE. ENCOUNTERS IN THE DARK blends communism with lucid classicism – while politicising the already delicate relations between the sexes.