General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

A Short Film About Killing

A Short Film About Killing (Polish: Krótki film o zabijaniu) is a 1988 Polish feature film directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, in which a young drifter murders a taxi driver in Warsaw, is sentenced to death, and is executed by the state, while the idealistic young lawyer assigned to defend him watches the execution helplessly¹^•¹⁶. It was expanded from episode V of Kieślowski's television series Dekalog, the episode associated with the commandment "Thou shalt not kill", and it became one of the central works of his career²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Original title / country	Krótki film o zabijaniu, Poland, produced 1987 by Studio Filmowe "Tor"¹^•⁴
Director and writers	Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski; screenplay by Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz¹
Premiere and length	Polish release 11 March 1988; 84 minutes (other listings give 81 to 85 minutes)¹^•³^•²
Principal cast	Mirosław Baka (Jacek Łazar), Krzysztof Globisz (the lawyer Piotr Balicki), Jan Tesarz (taxi driver Waldemar Rekowski)⁴
Key crew	Cinematography Sławomir Idziak, editing Ewa Smal, music Zbigniew Preisner, production design Halina Dobrowolska, producer Ryszard Chutkowski¹
Major awards	Cannes 1988 Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Prize; European Film Award 1988 for Best Film; Golden Lions at Gdynia 1988⁵
Subject	An anti-capital-punishment film built around two killings, a murder and a judicial execution¹

Spoilers

Plot and structure

The film follows three men in Warsaw whose paths cross: Jacek Łazar (Mirosław Baka), a sullen young drifter; Waldemar Rekowski (Jan Tesarz), a taxi driver; and Piotr Balicki (Krzysztof Globisz), a young lawyer who has just passed his bar examination³^•⁴. Jacek takes Waldemar's taxi to a remote spot on the city's outskirts and kills him, first strangling him with a rope and then, when he still shows signs of life, bludgeoning him with a stone⁹. Piotr takes on the defense, but the court sentences Jacek to death⁴.

The film is organized around two crimes shown in graphic detail: the senseless, almost botched murder, and the cold, procedurally flawless hanging carried out by the prison authorities¹. Kieślowski elides the trial itself, cutting from the crime to the verdict, and keeps the two halves in parallel: details of the first killing, such as Jacek winding rope around his hand, recur in the execution sequence³. Before the execution, Jacek opens up to Piotr in his cell and speaks of his younger sister, whose death he blames himself for¹⁰. Piotr, for whom the death sentence is his first professional defeat, is left to experience his first client's death as his own loss, and the film ends with him weeping on the outskirts of the city¹⁰^•¹¹.

Origin in the Decalogue

The idea for the Dekalog series came from Krzysztof Piesiewicz, a lawyer and Kieślowski's co-screenwriter on the earlier film No End (1984), who proposed filming the Ten Commandments in contemporary Poland⁶. Piesiewicz later explained that the whole series, including A Short Film About Killing, grew out of his disillusionment with a legal system that the Polish state treated as an instrument, after special laws passed in the early 1980s had, in his words, turned the whole legal system "into plasticine"⁷.

Money was a practical constraint. When Polish Television's funding proved sufficient for only eight of the ten episodes, Krzysztof Zanussi, head of the Tor film group, proposed shooting some episodes in dual television and cinema versions⁸. Kieślowski recalled that he offered to make two feature films cheaply, insisting that one be episode five, the "Thou shalt not kill" story, and let the ministry choose the other; they chose episode six, which became A Short Film About Love⁶. The scripts for both episodes were expanded to feature length, and shooting on Dekalog began in March 1987⁶. Following Kieślowski's plan, each episode had a different cinematographer, and he invited Sławomir Idziak to shoot episode five and the feature⁶.

Visual style

Idziak's cinematography is the film's signature. He used handmade and graduated filters, with greens and yellows predominating, often darkening the edges of the frame so the image seems to contract inward, a photochemical effect achieved in the camera rather than in the laboratory¹². After the Cannes screening a French critic wrote that the film had been shot in "the disgusting colour of urine"; Idziak later called this the most pertinent review the film received, explaining that the yellowish palette was meant to reflect the hopelessness and ugliness of the depicted world¹³.

The look was not planned from the start. When Idziak first showed the material, Kieślowski reacted angrily and left the room, and Idziak himself feared the experiment had gone too far; only after editing did the palette's emotional force become clear¹³. Ewa Smal's editing is marked by patience during the two killings: the murder of the taxi driver is held at length rather than cut away from, forcing the viewer to register how prolonged and physically graceless killing is¹².

Reception and awards

At the 1988 Cannes festival the film competed for the Palme d'Or and left with the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize, the critics' award shared with Claude Lanzmann's Hôtel Terminus⁵^•⁸. It also won the European Film Award for Best Film, credited to producer Ryszard Chutkowski, the Golden Lions at the Polish Feature Film Festival in Gdynia (tied with A Short Film About Love), the Bodil and Robert awards for best European or foreign film in Denmark, and a place in Cahiers du Cinéma's 1988 top ten⁵. The Cannes success drew worldwide critical attention to Kieślowski and eased fundraising for the rest of the Dekalog series⁸.

In Poland, the film's reception was shaped by an ongoing public debate on capital punishment. Most press commentary discussed the film in terms of the death penalty, and reviewers' judgments often followed their own positions on it; many read the film as a forceful protest against the death penalty, which opponents of the penalty counted as its great merit and supporters as its great weakness¹⁴.

Relationship to Dekalog V

The theatrical film is an expansion of the roughly hour-long television episode Dekalog V, with additional scenes rather than a different story². A scholar of Polish cinema has argued that the longer version shifts the register: the televised episode stays closer to an explicit argument about capital punishment, while the feature, with roughly thirty additional minutes of imagery, works as a more general "anti-killing" film¹⁵. The endings also differ: in the feature the lawyer breaks into tears at the city's outskirts, while in Dekalog V he shouts "I hate!" in the same setting¹¹.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026