‘The Big Chief’ review: Close-up on controversial Red Army spy Leopold Trepper

Dir/scr: Tomasz Wolski. Poland/Netherlands/France. 2025. 88mins

Caught within the crosshairs of historical past, Polish-Israeli communist Leopold Trepper went from hero to outcast. Tomasz Wolski’s eye-opening The Huge Chief deploys a wealth of expertly edited archive materials to chart Trepper’s journey from mastermind of the wartime Soviet intelligence community The Pink Orchestra to deal with arrest in Nineteen Seventies Poland. His prolonged spells on the mercy of state oppression and anti-Semitism place him firmly within the tumult of twentieth century politics, and make for a documentary as gripping as any John Le Carre fiction. 

As gripping as any John Le Carre fiction

Wolski has constructed a repute for his inventive use of archive materials to light up key moments in Poland’s previous, most just lately in 1970 (2021) and A 12 months In The Life Of A Nation (2024), which lined the imposition of martial legislation in 1981. The Huge Chief is not any exception however extends the attain to embody a powerful world array of each black and white and color footage from such numerous sources as Eva Braun’s dwelling films, Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral (2019) and a wide range of information companies. 

He begins by offering some context to Sixties Poland, below First Secretary Gomulka, explaining how anti-Semitism was more and more used for political acquire by the Communist regime. Jewish residents have been faraway from high-ranking state positions, and lots of opted to depart for Israel, Denmark, Sweden and America. The state denied Trepper the luxurious of leaving his homeland.

The Huge Chief’s opening chapter, entitled ’A Reportage’, follows French journalist Pierre Elkabbach as he arrives in Poland in 1972 to interview Trepper. His footage is confiscated earlier than he leaves and believed destroyed, earlier than being subsequently found in Polish archives. We will now see his pictures of drab metropolis streets the place residents conceal their faces from the digicam’s gaze. Elkabbach and his group are conscious they’re being adopted and are inspired to movie official rallies populated by enthusiastic crowds and dancers in nationwide costume. We will additionally see excerpts from the hour-long interview with Trepper who claims that he was by no means a spy however was “energetic in Nazi occupied France and Belgium”.

Within the second chapter, we learn the way Trepper arrived in Brussels to ascertain The Pink Orchestra, a community reporting to Soviet Russia because the clouds of battle gathered in Europe. He established a small export/import firm, made mates and contacts. The knowledge he supplied is claimed to have been accountable for 300,000 German casualties. Trepper was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1942 and subsequently labored for the Germans. There may be some debate over whether or not he was a double-agent and the way he survived when others have been tortured and killed. Trepper’s story is stuffed with surprising twists from his return to Moscow in 1945 and subsequent arrest and imprisonment by Stalin’s regime, to his place in Nineteen Seventies Poland the place he was refused permission to hitch his household in Jerusalem.

The footage is extraordinary all through,  balancing determined moments in abnormal wartime lives – the seek for meals, executions and hangings – with glimpses of the period’s most infamous leaders, whether or not an off-duty Hitler or Stalin’s physique mendacity in state. They supply the vivid background while a number of interviews enable Trepper’s personal phrases to stipulate the place he matches in that greater fresco of world occasions.

Wolski consists of poignant then and now interviews with, amongst others, Elkabbach ( who died in 2023), Trepper’s lawyer Daniel Soulez-Lariviere (who died in 2022) and journalist Gilles Perrault (who died in 2023) who printed the e-book L’Orchestre Rouge in 1967.

Trepper is seen as an affable household man, dedicated to his spouse Luba and kids, and but there may be nonetheless one thing primarily enigmatic about him. Wolski devotes the movie’s remaining chapter to a collection of sturdy tv debates through which Trepper defends himself towards hostile people who assert that his anti-fascist heroism was extra self-serving. The matter is rarely utterly resolved, however Trepper stays an interesting, Zelig-like determine.