Inspired by the 2011 drama 80 Million, Kamil Kochański’s comic is featured in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety in anticipation of the 2013 Oscars
Hours before martial law was imposed in Poland in 1981, Solidarity union activists withdraw 80 Million złoty from trade union accounts. Their action takes place in spite of strict police security, just before the union’s accounts were blocked. As the director of the Oscar-nominated film says, they showed "The belief that honesty, intelligence and truth in the end defeat lies, sheer power, and 'red' shenanigans", and their heroism has now inspired a comic book depicting their daring and extreme courage, which had collosal consequences for the entire nation.
Kamil "Kurt" Kochański’s three-page comic appears in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety and is based on director Waldemar Krzystek’s cinematic tale of fighting the communist system. The comic promotes the film, with the film’s producer Sylwester Banaszkiewicz saying in an interview with TVN24 that "we decided to reach the members of the American Film Academy thanks to a comic".
80 Million is based on events in December 1981 when, thanks to the initiative of Władysław Frasyniuk, leader of the Solidarity trade union's Lower Silesia branch, three activists withdrew 80 million Polish zlotys from the union's bank account in the city of Wrocław. The account was blocked on the 13th of December by the communist regime, who considered the withdrawal a "jump on the bank". They then failed to retrieve the money, which helped organise Solidarity’s legendary underground activities over the coming years, eventually, taking down Poland's communist government. Writing for the Hollywood Reporter, Stephen Dalton calls the movie a "punchy period thriller with a universal feel-good message" addiding that it "joins the swelling ranks of dramas from former Eastern Bloc nations that re-examine the dying days of Russian rule - films like Kolya from the Czech Republic, The Lives of Others from Germany, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days from Romania."
The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences meet in Los Angeles to screen 80 Million on the 3rd of December 2012, and then decide if the Polish candidate for the 2013 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film proceeds from the candidate category to an award nominee. The list of 10 Foreign Language Film nominees is announced at the beginning of the new year, with the list reduced to the five final nominees on the 10th of January 2013. Krzystek's film has made the rounds of international film festivals. In June 2012 it was screened in the Moscow International Film Festival's main competition, and on the 30th of November the director Krzystek and Krzysztof Kopka, his co-screenwriter, were awarded for Best Fiction Film Script at the 10th International Film Festival in Tirana.
Sources: culture.pl, PISF, Hollywood Reporter
Editor: Marta Jazowska