the man who stole the moon ... (fell from the sky and crashed on earth) (2010)
By Christoph Draeger
HDV, 25 min, 2010 We see dense fog, an airplane slowly sliding into it, crashing in the woods. The news rush across the globe. On the plane were Lech Kaczynski, then president of Poland, with his wife and 94 other passengers of high esteem. Poland is under shock, it seems the country’s whole elite was wiped out at one blow. The country mourns, the lacklustre president, conservative, a hater of homosexuals, is buried like a hero, with pomp reserved to very few. The site of the crash, Smolensk, in Russia, denotes a national loss that Poland had already experienced once. In 1940, Stalin had ordered his secret service to kill more than 20 000 members of the Polish elite in the woods of Katyn. Lech Kaczynski in fact was, with his people, on the way to Katyn to commemorate that crime: Smolensk – Katyn, Katyn – Smolensk. That could be the title of this film. The title of Christoph Draeger’s new film, the man who stole the moon … , especially produced for this exhibition, refers to two important events in Lech Kaczynski’s life: his early fame as child actor beside his twin brother Jaroslav in the successful movie The Two Who Stole the Moon (1962) and his tragic death, surrounded by myth…
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