A new film to be released on Netflix next month is set amid a real-life operation carried out by Poland’s communist authorities in the 1980s. In “Operation Hyacinth”, as it was known, security services gathered information on thousands of gay men with the aim of using it to blackmail them into cooperation.
The thriller follows a fictional police officer investigating a serial killer who targets gay men. As the case progresses, it increasingly affects his personal life as well as his professional one.
In a review after a screening last month, Polish news website Onet praised the movie for “skilfully using” the genres of police procedurals and film noir before “turning into a story about discovering one’s own sexuality and about forbidden love, which flourishes in spite of the oppressive apparatus of power”.
It also noted that it is “hard to resist the impression that the bygone reality shown on the screen rhymes with what is happening in our country today”. Poland’s current ruling party has led a vocal anti-LGBT campaign, which has seen the country ranked as the worst in the EU for LGBT people for the last two years.
Likewise, Vogue observed that “the film perfectly relates to what is happening in contemporary Poland: the campaign against LGBTQ+ people, hiding, not standing out”.
The real life Operation Hyacinth was launched in 1985 and saw the communist authorities collect information on around 11,000 gay men. This often involved interrogating the men – some of whom were detained in mass roundups – with intimate questions about their private lives.
The official reasons for this questioning were to combat crime (such as prostitution) and to fight the AIDS epidemic. However, the more likely motive was to collect information that could be used to blackmail people into cooperating with the authorities.
There is still controversy today over the status and whereabouts of the so-called “pink files” containing the information gathered in the 1980s. NGOs, including the Campaign Against Homophobia and Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, have appealed for the material to be destroyed.
However, it remains unclear which files still exist and where they are all being held (with some in police archives and others at the state Institute of National Remembrance), notes Onet.
Operation Hyacinth is the latest in a series of Netflix productions set in Poland. In May this year, Polish comedy Sexify was the most-watched show on Netflix worldwide, reported Newsweek.
In February, the streaming service broadcast its first ever original Polish animated series, Kajko and Kokosz, based on the famous comic of the same name. Netflix’s English-language production of The Witcher, based on the novels by Andrzej Sapkowski, was one of its biggest hits, with a second season set for release in December.
Main image credit: Netflix (promotional material)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
