The purpose of this article is to show the contribution of fi lm in shaping of social imagination of Katyń crime in Poles’ minds. Author places described fi lms in the background of today’s knowledge.

This article is in tended to provide a legally sound explanation of why and how the contemporary International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law legal frameworks offer tools to address the uncertain ty, lack of in formation, and the consequences thereof in relation to missin g persons and victims of enforced disappearances in the context of armed conflicts which predated the adoption of such frameworks. To this end, three scenarios will be examin ed: the contemporary claims of the families of those who were killed in the Katyń massacre in 1940; the claims for in formation and justice of the families of thousands who were subjected to enforced disappearances durin g the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939; and the identification efforts concernin g those reported missin g while in volved in military operations in the context of the 1944 Kaprolat/Hasselmann in cident which took place durin g the Second World War. The analysis of these scenarios is conducive to the development of more general reflections that would feed in to the debate over the legal relevance of the distant past in light of today’s in ternational legal framework.

Andrzej Wajda’s films are interesting and serious historical narratives, which enter in dialog both with academic historiography and with other forms of familiarization with the past. Some of Wajda’s historical films are part of the paradigm of the affirmative vision of history. It is a vision that focuses on creating the positive picture of the bygone world, on showing those elements of the past that a given community recognizes as glorious and heroic, worth imitating, commemorating, and honoring, which can be the object of pride or even worship. The affirma-tive vision of history belittles, leaves in the background or omits all those themes from the past that fall outside positive evaluation for various reasons and could distort a consistent favorable picture of the past of a community. In the present article I would like to examine from the comparative perspective of two films, “A Generation [ Pokolenie]” (1954) and “Katyń” (2007). The comparison between Andrzej Wajda’s two films made in the space of fifty years shows that despite the fact that the two pictures were produced in entirely different historico‑cultural contexts, using different film styles, the two screen stories present the affirmation of diametri-cally disparate versions of history, it is the dramatic strategies for and techniques of affirmation of history that remain the same in either case.