Silent, black-and-white footage filmed during the 1944 uprising in Warsaw, Poland against the Nazis has been turned into a breathtaking, colorized feature film with a modern day soundscape, the Daily Mail reports.
The Warsaw Uprising was a major World War II operation by the Polish resistance House Army against the German Nazis in order to liberate the city from the Third Reich's rule. The House Army's secondary aim was to liberate the city before the Soviets so that Poland could effectively underscore their independence. The uprising lasted 63 days and resulted in the deaths of around 200,000 rebels and residents, and mesmerizing footage chronicling the fighting has been partially fictionalized in the new film, "Warsaw Rising."
The Warsaw Rising Museum hired cinematographers to create the colorized, sound-filled feature film. The filmmakers added fictional voice-overs that would stitch together an imagined 1944 narrative of two brothers filming the resistance and commenting on what they witnessed. Director Jan Komasa created the film's storyline, while sound director Bartosz Putkiewicz matched the sound and music to the fictional brothers' dialogue.
The 90-minute movie took two years for museum historians and film experts to create, as authenticity was of utmost importance. Lip-reading experts carefully examined the footage to give the people filmed a proper voice, while historians consulted with surviving fighters and studied thousands of old pictures to ensure they would gave the right color and shade to each garment worn.
Museum director Jan Oldakowski admitted that some scenes of "fierce fighting" were re-enactments by insurgents of the action they had been apart of, and conceded it was possible that camera crews gave some direction to the rebels and Warsaw residents during filming, though the film is overall about as real and true to life as you can get.
"When someone cries in the film, he cried for real," Museum historian Piotr Sliwowski told the Daily Mail. "When someone is happy, he was happy for real. If someone dies, he really died."
Last month, the museum released the official trailer for the completed film, which will hit theaters in Poland and abroad next year right before the 70th anniversary of the uprising.
In the meantime, the museum has posted the trailer to its website in hopes that it can locate people still alive who were present during the battles. Some people have been located already, including Witold Kiezun, now 91, a former U.N. worker in Burundi who remains in Warsaw to this day, working as a professor of economics and management.
"I was going back to base when the chronicle people stopped me and filmed me," Kiezun said of being filmed back in 1944 during the uprising. "I smiled at them because I was madly happy that we won (a battle) and that we had captured this machine gun, a precious trophy. My bag is filled with hand grenades."
"[Making this film] was an insane idea," Oldakowski told the Daily Mail. "But we decided to tell the truth and make it contemporary by removing this black-and-white color barrier."
