If the fall of the Berlin Wall has a prehistory, maybe there is an integral part, or even the beginning: the December 1970 protests in Poland against food price-rises, the brutal suppression of which is here satirically reimagined by film-maker Tomasz Wolski using archive black-and-white footage of the street scenes with ambient sound effects. Wolski intersperses these with stop-motion-animated puppets of the mediocre party apparatchiks in charge, blandly directing the massacre from their smoke-filled rooms, having grumpy and panicky arguments, mouthing in sync to recently recovered audiotapes of their tapped phones; not so much Team America as Team Soviet Poland.
The effect is that of a bad dream, though less of a nightmare than living through it must have been. The protests became a colossal movement in many cities, including Gdańsk, and were brutally suppressed by the Polish authorities who deployed massive amounts of military hardware, killed 44 people and injured more than a thousand, though they finally made concessions by reversing the price-hikes and premier Władysław Gomułka resigned.
