Word: jacek
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Decalogue 5"--one of the best films in the series--was later expanded into "A Short Film About Killing," also playing at the MFA. A young lawyer defends a youth, Jacek, against a sentence of capital punishment for his brutal killing of a taxi driver. In the opening, the lawyer's words--"The law should not imitate nature, the law should improve it...For whom does the law avenge?"--emerge, disembodied, from a black screen. From the beginning, the emphasis is on the nature of justice. The film does not excuse the youth's crime; he is shown first strangling...
Cutting back and forth between the boy's story and his lawyer's arguments against capital punishment ("Since the days of Cain, no punishment has proven to be an adequate deterrent for murder."), the film culminates in Jacek's execution. The pandemonium surrounding the event belies the ideal of dispassionate justice. The mayhem in the execution room mirrors Jacek's struggle with his stubborn victim. It is not execution, but revenge, and the law denounces revenge...
...government sources say Polish President LECH WALESA may have been forced to dismiss a trusted aide because of accusations that he was a KGB spy. Jacek Merkel, who quietly resigned in March as Minister of State in charge of defense and security, had worked closely with Walesa as a shipyard engineer and Solidarity leader. Merkel privately maintains that political enemies fabricated evidence against him, and is fighting to clear his name. The Interior Ministry has refused to release its police collaborator lists, compiled in the communist era, because the files may contain disinformation about people who had no relationship with...