The Codes

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The Codes
Directed by	Wojciech Has
Written by	Andrzej Kijowski
Starring	Jan Kreczmar Zbigniew Cybulski Irena Eichlerówna
Music by	Krzysztof Penderecki
Cinematography	Mieczysław Jahoda
Release date(s)	1966
Running time	80 min
Language	Polish
IMDb profile

The Codes is the English title for Szyfry, a Polish film released in 1966, directed by Wojciech Has.

Tadeusz (Jan Kreczmar) is a Polish veteran of World War II who fled to London at the end of the war, leaving behind his wife Zofia (Irena Eichlerówna) and son, Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), who disappeared when he was 12 years old. Tadeusz returns to Kraków to discover that Maciek is alive, his wife may have been a partisan and that his son may have turned in his own mother in to the authorities. During Maciek's struggle to understand his parents' history, questions of collaboration with the Gestapo and Home Army retribution arise. Has pictures the mystical lost boy in a dark fairy-tale forest, full of the ghosts of the war and wholesale executions. The hypnotic quality of these excursions foreshadows the mesmerizing passages of Has's later film, The Hour-Glass Sanatorium.