lincz

This film reconstructs the events surrounding one of the most disturbing and emotive court cases Poland has witnessed in recent years: in early July 2005 the inhabitants of a minor provincial town in north east Poland battered a previously convicted homeless person, who had terrorised them for weeks, to death.

The narrative begins on a hot summer’s day when the sixty-one-year-old Zaranek returns to the village where he resided prior to his latest prison term. Shortly after the village shop sales assistant refuses to sell him beer on credit, she is discovered in a pool of blood on the floor of her ravaged shop. She doesn’t dare go to the police, and when her neighbour does she is likewise found beaten up at the roadside shortly thereafter. A few days later Zaranek visits an old friend Basia; her refusal to reveal the whereabouts of her pension money sees her struck to the floor and when her neighbour attempts to alert the police Zaranek cuts her telephone wire with a machete. Soon, his wave of terror having encompassed ever greater numbers of local inhabitants, nobody feels safe. The locals request police protection; in vain however as the district as a whole possesses only one radio car, and this has been tasked with watching over a folk festival in the neighbourhood. “So many sturdy young men, and you don’t know how to deal with this grandpa?” a policeman asks the man who reports to the police post with a slashed arm...