Violated Letters, on OVID.tv

Handwritten letters still feel like a much more personal statement than e-mails or texts. Therefore, the interception and censorship of a private letter feels like a much more personal intrusion than snooping on e-mails. The Polish Communist regime did so, by the tens of millions. In fact, internal Communist Party reports boasted of the volume of their internal surveillance and argued for increasingly draconian punitive applications. Viewers can hear (and read subtitles of) those reports along with dramatic examples of the censored correspondence in Marciej Drygas’s short-ish documentary, Violated Letters, which premieres today on OVID.tv.

Every word in Violated Letters could be considered a historical document. Essentially, it shares stylistic and compositional similarities with Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, The Ordinary Thing, and other previous documentaries, in which off-screen voices read letters accompanied by archival video from the period under consideration. There is not a strict narrative as such, but the selected texts illustrate the sweep of Twentieth Century Polish history.

Drygas starts with poor Polish peasants complaining about the brutality of the occupying Soviet Red Army, and ends with the censorship office’s 1989 instructions regarding how to hide or dispose of evidence of their crimes. Sometimes, Drygas incorporates eye-witness accounts of traumatic historical events, like a Polish soldier mobilized for the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Yet, there are small-scale disasters, like the woman unable to obtain a passport to visit her sick mother abroad, who asks a friend to send her a bereavement notice as a ruse.

By far, the most heartbreaking correspondence must be the letter sent by a young boy to the figurehead president, begging for clemency for his father, Karol Chmielowski, who had been sentenced to death. More than any other letter, young Chmilowski’s illuminates the regime’s petty cruelty.

Letter after letter also express resentment for the Party’s corruption and outrage at the constantly rising prices. Based on the Polish experience, socialism produces the opposite of affordability. However, one inspiring aspect of the film is the Polish people’s undiminished Catholic faith, despite the propaganda and thuggery described by letter-writers.

This is one of the most powerful films ever assembled from archival materials. It does not concern itself with names and dates, but it constitutes a comprehensive history lesson. Even more remarkably, Drygas achieves all this just within a one-hour running time. Very highly recommended, Violated Letters starts streaming today (10/1) on OVID.tv.