Birthday of The Promised Land
Absolutely clear that this post is not about the land into which the knights participating in the Crusades were torn. This is about the film by Andrzej Wajda. The premiere of the film "The Promised Land" took place in Poland on February 21, 1975.
The film by Andrzej Wajda is based on the novel of the same name by the Polish writer, Nobel Prize winner in literature in 1924, Władysław Reymont. The novel was written in 1899.
In July 1975, the film "The Promised Land" participated in the competitive program of the Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) and, along with the films "Dersu Uzala" by Akira Kurosawa and "We All Loved Each Other So Much" by Ettore Scola, was awarded the Golden Prize of this festival.
Well-known Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev claims that the organizers of the Moscow Film Festival put Andrzej Wajda on the condition that he should cut a number of scenes from the film, and in exchange for this he was promised a Golden Prize. Both sides kept their promises. True, it is not known exactly which scenes were subject to "castration". Although, we can assume that these were erotic scenes, which, as Wajda later recalled, he was ashamed himself.
In 1976, the film "Promised Land" was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category. But the members of the American Film Academy, unlike the jury of the Moscow International Film Festival, decided that the winner should be alone and awarded the Oscar to the film "Dersu Uzala".
Despite the obvious success (after all, the film was included in the top five films produced outside the United States), Wajda's film was hardly shown in American cinemas. This conclusion can be drawn on the basis of the almost complete lack of reviews on the film by professional film critics. Polish Wikipedia explains the absence of “The Promised Land” in the wide American box office by the efforts of the powerful Jewish lobby in the American film industry, which saw Wajda's masterpiece as a manifestation of anti-Semitism.
To some extent, this conclusion is confirmed by Michał Oleszczyk, one of the followers of Roger Ebert, who wrote in his 2016 review of the films of Andrzej Wajda:
"An Oscar nomination didn’t protect the film against some unjust accusation of alleged anti-Semitism on Wajda’s part (when, in fact, he righteously removed all anti-Semitic elements from Władysław Reymont’s source novel). Only now, thanks to a great DVD issued by British company Second Run, can the Western viewer see just how ambitious this epic of late-19th century capitalist excess in the multi-cultural city of Łódź really is. There are several cuts of the film, ranging from just-over-two to just-under-five hours, but the three-hour one can be seen as definitive. The film’s rich portrayal of 19th century class struggle and personal ambition ranks with Jan Troell’s “The Emigrants” and “The New Land” as the most accomplished screen realization of a world-defining era that took no prisoners and transformed our reality into the industry-reliant world of today."
"The Promised Land" was not only a festival, but also a spectator success. 69% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users around the world gave this film a rating of 8 to 10.
Based on the foregoing, the rating of the film according to the version of FilmGourmand was 8.432, which allowed it to take 353rd place in the Golden Thousand.
