190 KILLING FIELDS, THE
Reel History Versus Real History
The plot of Kanał is fictional but the general story it tells about the final days of the
Uprising is historically very accurate. As depicted in the film, by the end of Sep-
tember 1944, German forces had retaken most of the city. AK fighters were hold-
ing out in five isolated pockets, including an area within the suburb of Mokotów
that was less than a mile long and half a mile wide, defended by about 2,750 insur-
gents. On 24 September 1944 German forces mounted an offensive against the
Mokotów pocket from the south. Over the next three days of heavy fighting, the
Polish defense perimeter shrank to just a few blocks as advancing Germans exe-
cuted wounded soldiers, even hospital personnel. On 26 September 9,000 civil-
ians fled Mokotów during a two- hour early after noon cease fire. That eve ning, as
depicted in the film, some 800 re sis tance fighters and civilians, many wounded,
started evacuating through the sewers and headed for the city center, about two
miles due north (Mokotów fell the next day and the Germans captured some 1,500
remaining fighters and 5,000 civilians). As also represented in the film, some AK
fighters (actually about 150) headed in the wrong direction and unwittingly climbed
out of the sewers at Dworkowa Street, in German- held territory half a mile to the
southeast of Mokotów; 120 of them were captured and summarily executed.
A monument now stands there in their memory. Actual conditions in the sewers
were every bit horrific as the film shows. In his review of the film (cited earlier),
Stanislaw Grzelecki observed, “I followed the same underground road from Mokotów
to the centre of town as Jerzy Stawiński, and I, like he, spent seventeen hours in the
sewers. I saw and experienced enough to state that Wajda’s film is telling the truth.”Killing Fields, The (1984)
Synopsis
The Killing Fields is a British war drama written by Bruce Robinson, directed by
Roland Joffé and produced by David Puttnam. Starring Sam Waterston, Haing S.
Ngor, Julian Sands, and John Malkovich, the film concerns the experiences of two
journalists who are close friends— Cambodian Dith Pran and American Sydney
Schanberg— after the Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia in the 1970s.Background
In 1976 New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize for report-
ing on the fall of Cambodia to the genocidal Khmer Rouge in 1975. Four years
later Schanberg published “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” (1980), a long article
about the astonishing survival of Dith Pran, a Cambodian friend and colleague of
Schanberg who managed to escape from the Khmer Rouge after a long captivity
and find safety in Thailand in October 1979. British producer David Puttnam
(Chariots of Fire) read the article and knew immediately he wanted to make a film
version of Pran’s story. Puttnam bought the film rights and eventually secured a
$16 million bud get: $8 million from Goldcrest Films (London); $4 million from
foreign distributors, tax shelters, and a UK government fund; and $4 million