From Netflix:
An astronaut’s return after a 30-year disappearance rekindles a lost love and sparks interest from a corporation determined to learn why he hasn’t aged.
From Netflix you can stream the 8 episodes of this sci-fi romance, complete with young pilots competing for a woman and the chance to fly a space mission. In Polish with English subtitles. Each episode lasts less than 50 minutes.
Interesting plot and lots of human interest and interaction.
From IMDB:
After bombing attack, which killed his friends from the Border Guard, Captain Wiktor Rebrow trying to unravel the mystery and figure out what happened and who is behind it all.
From MHz Choice:
A tense Polish thriller about an elite border unit specializing in human trafficking cases. After a bomb attack decimates his team, the lone survivor sets out to bring the perpetrators to justice.
From MHz Choice you can stream the only Polish TV series offered. Only Season 1 is available with its 6 episodes, each about 45 minutes. “Wataha” according to the subtitles means “The Pack” even though IMDB calls it “The Border.”
UNFORTUNATELY: Season 1 resolves neither the mystery nor the injustices. IMDB describes the episodes of Season 2 and even those episodes do not end the story. Even though the series is very well done, you might want to wait until someday you can see the story to its conclusion.
Along the border between Poland and the Ukraine there is human trafficking and that is exclusively where the action takes place. But the story is really about the border guard Wiktor Rebrow who is framed for several murders and the DA Iga Dobosz who pursues Rebrow relentlessly but finally realizes Rebrow was set up just as Rebrow escapes from the police and flees toward the Ukraine at the unsatisfactory end of Season 1.
“Bleak”, “Grungy”, “Ugly” and “Depressing” are a few words that describe the Polish territory and its inhabitants. If this presentation is representative of Poland, you can forget about ever visiting Poland.
Isn’t it too bad that the episodes are so exciting when there will be no satisfactory conclusion in the foreseeable future?
From MHz Choice:
Lars Mikkelsen (‘Borgen’, ‘1864’) stars as the leader of a joint Danish-German-Belgian investigative team tasked with solving a series of murders in this gripping crime thriller from the writers of ‘The Eagle’.
What makes this one season of 8 episodes streamed from MHz Choice so gripping for me is that the villain Marius Loukauskis is so vile and so cynically amoral that I could not wait to get to the conclusion. Unfortunately MHz Choice doled out the episodes week after week. Finally you can see now all the episodes at once, which is why I waited to recommend and review this excellent series.
Because the “Team” is assembled from several countries (even though the production is from Denmark), you will hear many languages: French, English, German, and others. As usual they are accompanied by subtitles.
Each member of the team has their own personal story to tell. Often that story is quite unhappy.
WARNING: If you are squeamish, DO NOT WATCH this series (which is not acceptable for young people, let alone lots of adults).
From Wikipedia:
Europa Europa is a 1990 film directed by Agnieszka Holland. Its original German title is Hitlerjunge Salomon, i.e. “Hitler Youth Salomon”. It is based on the 1989 autobiography of Solomon Perel, a German Jewish boy who escaped the Holocaust by masquerading not just as a non-Jew, but as an elite “Aryan” German. The film stars Marco Hofschneider and Julie Delpy; Perel appears briefly as himself in the finale. The film is an international co-production between CCC Film and companies in France and Poland.
Hopefully you will watch both this 2 hour film and also the 3 hour film Sunshine.
Whereas “Sunshine” is an epic showing the history of Hungarian Jews during several epochs, “Europa Europa” is a true story about one Jewish teenager’s survival in the confusing changes in political alignment in Germany, Poland, and Russia between Hitler and Stalin.
WARNING: Once again (as in “Sunshine”) there will be some ugly scenes. Once such scene shows what it was like in the Jewish ghetto during WWII when the Germans either starved the Jews, or killed them outright, or sent them to concentration camps.
If this were not an autobiography I would label it as fantasy or magic realism or some such departure from reality. Yupp, the teenager, had literally unbelievable good luck. However, he survived partly because in all his reincarnations he learned to speak not only German but also Polish and Russian. Of course, he was also very resourceful. Moreover, when faced with a moral choice, he chose survival.
Watching the indoctrination of the Nazi Youth into a violent anti-Semitism was a revelation.
Despite the story’s best efforts, I will personally never believe that the German people did not know what was happening to the Jews.
Coupled with “Sunshine” I would call this film a DO NOT MISS!
From NetFlix:
As Nazis overrun Warsaw, many of the city’s Jews hide out in sewers, where they encounter Leopold, an anti-Semitic sanitation worker. His prejudice reflects the rift between Poland’s Jews and Catholics in this film inspired by true events.
This true story of a Polish Christian man who protected a group of Polish Jews hiding in the sewers to escape the German massacre of Polish Jews is not easy to watch. Be sure to read the final explanatory screen shots which tell what happened in real life to the characters in the film.
Sometimes the day to day details of grubby survival seemed a bit tedious. But the intent is to show that under stress we can accommodate and life goes on.
Also evident was the extreme prejudice of Polish Catholics towards Jews. At several times a Catholic Pole is surprised to learn that Jesus was a Jew.
At one harrowing point in the film, just above a group of Jews in the sewer is a Catholic church in which children are receiving their first holy communion. At that point a heavy rain starts such that the sewers begin to fill and threaten the Jews with drowning.
To encourage you to watch a somewhat grim film, I promise you a happy ending for the Jews in hiding (thanks to the Germans evacuating to escape the Russians).
A father and son run a business importing used clothes from France to Poland. When the son discovers his father’s photo in a tabloid newspaper with the accusation that he was a secret informer – instead of the Solidarity hero he always looked up to – the son begins to have doubts.
Life in Poland under the Communists meant living in an atmosphere of fear. Solidarity members had the courage to stand up to the regime and sometimes lost their lives or freedom as a result. In this film we see a father and son very close to one another only to have that love threatened by revelations from the past. Well-made with fine acting, the portrayal of doubt creeping into the life of the family is very well done. Even the potentially mundane daily activities (coaxing a child to eat) are never boring and possibly add to the underlying tension of wanting everything to be alright even though something is amiss.
We saw this Polish film (with English subtitles) at a neighborhood film festival. Unfortunately NetFlix does not currently offer the film. But if you get a chance to see this film, the viewing is well worth the time.