The Polish title translates to Shadows, but the movie can be found in the rental services under the name The Road Home (which risks confusion with a 1999 Chinese movie with the same title). The place is Poland and the year is 1945, right after the end of WWII. Russians soldiers and tanks are ubiquitous and the fledgling communist government has a tenuous hold on power, as Nationalist partisans roam the forests and conduct night raids. Ethnic Germans are being deported back to Germany in appalling conditions. The corruption and misdeeds of the prewar Polish government are being exposed, principally the appalling lack of military preparation prior to the German onslaught in 1939.
All of this is seen through the eyes of Jerzy Ostrovsky, a ten year old child. Jerzy is blond and blue-eyed, thus a candidate for membership in the mythical "Aryan race"; he was an unwitting part of a Nazi program to take by force children like him to Germany to be indoctrinated as "culturally German". Jerzy has just been repatriated and returned to his family; his mother (whose welcome is strangely subdued) and his paternal grandparents (Jerzy's father is missing since 1939 and presumed dead). Jerzy's family seems to have weathered the Nazi occupation; they still possess their large country estate more or less intact. Jerzy's mother refuses to play her role as widow of a hero and is struggling to lead a normal life, while Jerzy's grandfather clings to Poland's traditions and past military glory. Jerzy is more proficient in German than in Polish (he is taunted and abused by other children at school) and he refuses to believe his father is dead.
Jerzy's take on reality is poetic and has at times the quality of a fairy tale, and we see what he actually witnesses as well what he imagines or dreams. The movie is heavily symbolic, with an eagle, a white horse and the father's ghost a part of the plot. Director Jerzy Kaszubowski, who also wrote the script does an excellent job of integrating disparate elements into a coherent movie, and acting is excellent all around. If anything could be objected is that knowledge of recent Polish history is taken for granted, which may disorient at times the non-Polish viewer (like me).
