Leave No Traces (Jan P. Matsuszynski, 2021)

 

Jan P. Matsuszynski’s Leave No Traces doesn’t make for the most comfortable viewing at a time of enforced deportations based on unfounded allegations and disregard for due process and constitutional rights; over more than two and a half hours, it patiently and (appropriately) drainingly explores a Polish legal system of astounding self-righteous malevolence, capable of drawing on seemingly unlimited resources for the sake of self-preservation. It focuses on the real-life case of Grzegorz Przemyk, an 18-year-old student who was detained by police in 1983 for trivial reasons and hideously beaten by them, dying of his internal injuries within a few days; given all the evidence, including a friend’s eye-witness testimony, the focus of investigation ought to be clear, but it comes more naturally to the authorities to slander, deflect and lie, most poignantly here in the character of an innocent paramedic who transported the already doomed Przemyk to hospital, targeted as a more acceptable scapegoat and placed under impossible pressure to make a false confession. The activity isn’t confined to the shadowy depths: when the country’s chief prosecutor (one of the few people in the film with an apparent ethical compass) comments that the whole thing would have been long forgotten if not for the near-crazed focus on protecting the identified officers, the next scene contains a radio news announcement that he’s been removed from his post. But the film, pointedly, excludes any examination of the offenders’ state of mind, of whether they feel guilt or remorse, this being irrelevant to the workings of the system. The viewer feels increasingly drained, furious, afraid, and hemmed in: early on, the BBC’s reporting, and considerations relating to an upcoming Papal visit, provide some momentum toward objectivity and transparency, but these eventually fall out of the picture, the process following no logic or morality but its own, even the sanest and most determined witness barely able to withstand the onslaught.