Actor - how to play communist leader in Black Thursday?

Pszoniak, who now lives in Paris, was hired for the role in the hard-hitting drama Black Thursday, which focuses on the bloody repression of workers' protests in December 1970. Forty two people died in the clampdown in Gdynia, north Poland.

The film, which went on nationwide release earlier this year, is competing in the main competition of next month's Polish Film Festival.

“I took it as a professional challenge,” the actor said of the role.

“I listened to recordings of [communist leader at the time] Wladyslaw Gomulka, but I didn't want to imitate him,” he insisted.

“I had to create this figure: to evoke Gomulka, but also to say something from myself. Suddenly I found the key to this role in one of his speeches: I heard a man, I felt a crack, it was not the same Gomulka as that of his public appearances.”

Pszoniak, whose roles include Robespierre in Andrzej Wajda's Danton and WW II martyr Janusz Korczak in the 1990 biopic by the same director, believes that the dialogue written for Gomulka in Black Thursday authentically captures the communist leader's outlook.

The 36th Polish Film Festival begins on 6 June. (nh)

Source: Polskie Radio - Dwojka