„Ulica Graniczna”. Film pod specjalnym nadzorem

Abstract

The idea to pay tribute to the Jews murdered during the Holocaust probably arose in Aleksander Ford’s mind already in the summer of 1944, while he was recording Nazi crimes in his bleak documentary Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe. In 1946, he wrote the screenplay of Border Street together with Jan Fethke and Ludwik Starski, and then, when preparing the shooting script, he made several changes to it, significantly radicalizing its main message. Ford made the film in 1947 in Czechoslovakia, where it was more difficult to control him. Border Street was ready for distribution in the spring of 1948. In the summer of the same year, it received a major award at the Venice film festival, yet it did not find its way to Polish cinemas before June 1949. The leaders of the governing party were mostly afraid of the manner in which Polish-Jewish relations during the German occupation were presented in the film and of the possible reactions of those viewers who identified the post-war governing elite with “Judeo-Communism”. Hence, the attempt to exercise strict control over Border Street, visible already at the stage of drawing up the script and then strengthened during production and preparation for distribution.