Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on August 2012

Acclaimed filmmaker Agnieszka Holland went to great lengths to create her latest work. After many years working abroad, the director returned to her native Poland to film In Darkness, the remarkable true story of Polish sanitation worker Leopold Socha, who used his knowledge of the sewer system to hide a group of Jews during the Holocaust. The cast and crew had to endure extreme conditions to bring the tale to the screen.

“When I close my eyes now, I just remember the cold and the damp,” Holland told Metropolis. “We wanted to film in the sewers of Lvov where the story happened, but the conditions were so bad we couldn’t stay down there more than an hour.” The trying shoot was completed through the seamless blending of the sewers of Berlin and other cities with sets built in special tanks.

Another complication arose from the characters speaking six different languages, including Yiddish and an old dialect of Polish that is no longer used. “It was hard to remember what language to use with which person,” the multilingual director recalled. Yet another tense moment came after the film was already completed, when survivor Krystyna Chiger, who was eight years old when she hid in the sewers for 14 months, saw the film in New York. “I was very nervous,” the director explained. “Here was a living witness who might say ‘that is wrong and this is wrong,’ but she saw the film with her husband and children and they were all very moved by it.”

In Darkness opens in Japan on Sep 22.