Museum open at 12:00pm
Cinema is closed now
Museum open at 12:00pm
Cinema is closed now
Private Investigation
Film and a meeting with Olga Drenda
30.07.2026 19:30
Polish Private Investigati on set in the Łódź Province during the final years of the Polish People’s Republic. The main character, a motocross champion – played brilliantly by a desperate and weary Roman Wilhelmi –loses his family in an accident caused by a drunk driver. He decides to find the culprit himself and mete out justice.
This is a classic scenario familiar from hundreds of action films, but while Wojciech Wójcik’s film can be classified as one of the era’s experiments with genre cinema, it is also a document of its time.
The poet Jacek Żebrowski once remarked during a screening of Private Investigation that it shows how, in the 1980s, the authorities legitimized violence as the basis of interpersonal relationships. Sociologists at the end of that era would agree with him: the term “anomie” frequently appeared in their analyses at the time. In such a reality, are people more inclined to watch films about lone avengers?
This is a classic scenario familiar from hundreds of action films, but while Wojciech Wójcik’s film can be classified as one of the era’s experiments with genre cinema, it is also a document of its time.
The poet Jacek Żebrowski once remarked during a screening of Private Investigation that it shows how, in the 1980s, the authorities legitimized violence as the basis of interpersonal relationships. Sociologists at the end of that era would agree with him: the term “anomie” frequently appeared in their analyses at the time. In such a reality, are people more inclined to watch films about lone avengers?
Genre cinema often acts as the most accurate barometer of unsettling, underground currents that influence the collective mood. Was this the case with one of the rare examples of a Polish revenge movie from that time?
A must-see film also for fans of motor culture in the People’s Republic of Poland.
[Olga Drenda]
[Olga Drenda]
