Dekalog

Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog (1988) was originally produced for Polish television as ten roughly hour-long films, each inspired by one of the Ten Commandments, set among the residents of a single Warsaw housing estate (the Stegny block in Mokotów). The cycle won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes 1989 in a special out-of-competition screening. The films were widely covered as the cycle that elevated Polish television into European art cinema; Dekalog is now regularly placed at or near the top of any serious survey of the greatest television ever made.

Each film is structured around a moral dilemma broadly corresponding to one Commandment, but the linkages are interrogative rather than illustrative; characters from different episodes occasionally cross paths in the housing-estate corridors. The cinematography rotates among nine different cinematographers across the ten episodes (with Sławomir Idziak shooting the famous fifth (A Short Film About Killing) and the same fifth and sixth episodes also released as theatrical features). The cast includes the major Polish actors of the era: Krystyna Janda, Henryk Baranowski, Daniel Olbrychski, Jerzy Stuhr, Aleksander Bardini.

The cycle's commitment to moral specificity (each Commandment confronted with a contemporary Polish situation that exposes its difficulty rather than its sufficiency) produced a body of work that has steadily climbed in critical estimation. Kieślowski went on to The Double Life of Véronique and the Three Colours trilogy; Dekalog remains the achievement that established him as one of the major filmmakers of the late twentieth century.