Dariusz Jablonski Movies

When Majka (Maja Barelkowska) gets tired of pretending that her illegitimate daughter is her sister, she kidnaps the girl and takes on her mother, who has been posing as the child's mother. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

In 1987, 400 color slides were discovered in a second-hand bookstore in Vienna that turned out to be a major historical find in documentation of the holocaust. The slides were the work of Walter Genewein, a Nazi accountant involved in the relocation of Polish Jews to the Lodz ghetto. He was obsessed with recording what he called "subhumans in the process of being civilized by the German culture of work and organization," so in 1939 he obtained a camera and a supply of new color film, and began taking an exhaustive series of photos, recording the suffering around him with a coldly clinical detachment. Director Darius Jablonski has married Genewein's images (and copious data from his journals) with the recollections of Dr. Arnold Mostowicz, a contagious disease expert who is a survivor of the Lodz ghetto, to create this portrait of a key hub in the Nazi death machine, where up to 300,000 people were interned ... and only 70,000 survived. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Written and directed by Artur Urbanski, Bellissima follows aging femme fatale Elzbieta (Ewa Kasprzyk) in her efforts to push her daughter, Maria (Maria Goralczyk), into the media stoplight she believes she herself was denied. Maria, however, does not have the same desire, and goes as far as to walk out on the filming of a TV commercial which would have involved kissing the boy with whom Elzbieta is having an affair. Maria eventually runs away, even if it's only to the house of her next-door neighbors. Though she does become successful in the long run, a twist of fate leaves her taking care of her mother's most recent child. ~ Tracie Cooper, Rovi

Ryszard Kuklinski was a colonel in the Polish Army who had access to some of his nation's most carefully guarded military secrets, and beginning in 1972, he made a fateful decision to betray his country in hopes of saving it. As tensions between America and the U.S.S.R. grew, Kuklinski came to saw Poland less as a Soviet ally than a player caught in the middle, likely to be reduced to rubble in the event of an all-out war between the superpowers. So Kuklinski began passing classified Warsaw Pact documents to American CIA operatives, and though his actions may have helped to end the Cold War, he also had to live with the knowledge that he did so while also compromising the security of his nation and his colleagues in the military. Filmmaker Dariusz Jablonski was set to interview Kuklinski shortly before the colonel died in 2004, and he unwittingly found himself becoming a part of Kuklinski's story as he pieced together the facts behind his remarkable story. War Games And The Man Who Stopped Them is a documentary by Jablonski that tells the true story of Kuklinski's double life and the secrets that followed him even after his death. The film was an official selection at the 2009 Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi