Transfiguration Hospital

Production and year: Poland 1978 Genre: drama, psychological, war Director: Edward Żebrowski Cast: Piotr Dejmek, Gustaw Holoubek, Jerzy Bińczycki Medical theme: psychiatric hospital Description: The year is 1939. After graduating from medical school, 25-year-old Stefan (Dejmek) takes a job at a hospital. This is not a typical psychiatric facility—the doctors working there remind me personally of the distinguished officers from Tomasz Bagiński’s *The Art of Falling*, who, having lost their minds and touch with reality, nurture their eccentricities far from the world, unconcerned with the human suffering this entails. There is no room for any moral standards here—corporal punishment is the order of the day; a patient who interrupts a ceremony is driven into a catatonic state by his doctor; an engineer (Bińczycki), who checks himself into the facility due to memory loss and anxiety, is driven to a state of bestiality and then outright murdered in the operating room. All of this is accompanied by the sounds of pigs raised in the hospital pen—for the purpose of selling them and exchanging the money for medicine. The “idyll” is interrupted by the arrival of German soldiers, who have orders to close the hospital and kill all the patients. Based on Stanisław Lem’s novel of the same title.