Interrogation

Interrogation (Przesłuchanie, 1989) is Ryszard Bugajski's harrowing prison drama, and you can watch online on iFILM. Cabaret singer Tonia drinks the night away with friends and wakes up not at home but in a cell, with no idea why.

The year is the early 1950s, and Poland's secret police want Tonia to sign a denunciation of a man she barely knows. She won't. What follows is years inside: looping interrogations, solitary confinement, humiliation, every trick to break her with lies and small mercies. Krystyna Janda plays her as a woman who holds out less from courage than from sheer stubbornness, while her bond with her captors grows stranger than the officers ever intended.

Bugajski finished the film back in 1982, but the communist authorities buried it on a shelf for nearly a decade — it spoke too plainly about Stalin-era methods. When Interrogation finally reached audiences, Janda took the Best Actress prize at Cannes. This is hard, uncomfortable cinema that lands its blows through a face in close-up rather than plot twists. Stream Interrogation (1989) online on iFILM.