People familiar with Polish history will know how Katyń will end, long before they enter the cinema. Wajda's long awaited new film tells the story of the near-simultaneous Soviet and German invasions of Poland in September 1939, and the Red Army's subsequent capture, imprisonment, and murder of some 20,000 Polish officers in the forests near the Russian village of Katyń. The justification for the murder was straightforward. These were Poland's best-educated and most patriotic soldiers. They were the intellectual elite who could obstruct the Soviet Union's plans to absorb and "Sovietize" Poland's eastern territories. Amongst the dead was Andrzej Wajda's father.

The story here is told through the eyes of the women; mothers, wives and daughters of the victims executed on Stalin's orders. In Poland, the very word "Katyń" evokes not just this mass murder but the many Soviet falsehoods surrounding the history of World War II and the Soviet invasion of Poland. Katyń wasn't a single wartime event, but a series of lies and distortions, told over decades, designed to disguise the reality of the Soviet postwar occupation and Poland's loss of sovereignty. Wadja meticulously brings this historical story to the screen and using his trademark distance and even handedness with remarkable restraint.