Release Information

November 30, 1993

Montréal

Library and Archives Canada - Canadian Feature Film Database (LAC)

Budget

Distributors

Production Details

Director

Jan Kidawa-Blonski

The story of Janek is that of a young boy born in Poland during the Second World War and whose infirmity is a metaphor for his country’s history. He is a hunchback and his hump grows as his unhappiness increases. Janek is ten years old when his father commits suicide. His father is a man incapable of facing reality and accepting the communist system that his own brother represents in the region. But this uncle who comes to live with his mother is Janek’s true father, as he will quickly learn. At the end of the 1960s, a violent anti-Semitic campaign causes a mass exodus of Polish Jews and forces Janek to give up his first love, a young Jewish girl. More than ten years later, the Solidarity movement comes to power, communism comes to an end while the market economy struggles to become established. Janek’s father transforms himself into a capitalist and Janek’s infirmity no longer worsens. Formerly intelligent and dynamic, Janek gradually loses hope and sinks into the poverty that the new system has failed to stop.

Source: Library and Archives Canada - Canadian Feature Film Database (LAC)