The Pianist
A Jewish pianist in occupied Warsaw survives the ghetto and years of hiding alone, clinging to bare existence as the city and his family are destroyed around him.
Cannes Palme d'Or 2002 won
Wladyslaw Szpilman, a celebrated Polish Jewish pianist, is trapped in the Warsaw ghetto as the German occupation tightens, loses his family to the deportations, and survives the following years in hiding and ruin, kept alive at one point by a German officer who hears him play.
The film depicts survival as a kind of dissociation, the numb and near-silent persistence of a self stripped of everything but the will to continue. It gives a clinician an unhurried study of endurance under Holocaust trauma and the flattening of feeling that outlasts it. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2002 and is based on the memoir The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman.
Details
- 2002
- France
- Polish
- Film