‘The Big Chief’ review: Close-up on controversial Red Army spy Leopold Trepper

Dir/scr: Tomasz Wolski. Poland/Netherlands/France. 2025. 88mins

Caught within the crosshairs of historical past, Polish-Israeli communist Leopold Trepper went from hero to outcast. Tomasz Wolski’s eye-opening The Massive Chief deploys a wealth of expertly edited archive materials to chart Trepper’s journey from mastermind of the wartime Soviet intelligence community The Pink Orchestra to deal with arrest in Nineteen Seventies Poland. His prolonged spells on the mercy of state oppression and anti-Semitism place him firmly within the tumult of twentieth century politics, and make for a documentary as gripping as any John Le Carre fiction. 

As gripping as any John Le Carre fiction

Wolski has constructed a status for his inventive use of archive materials to light up key moments in Poland’s previous, most just lately in 1970 (2021) and A Yr In The Life Of A Nation (2024), which coated the imposition of martial regulation in 1981. The Massive Chief isn’t any exception however extends the attain to embody a formidable world array of each black and white and color footage from such numerous sources as Eva Braun’s house films, Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral (2019) and quite a lot of information businesses. 

He begins by offering some context to Nineteen Sixties Poland, below First Secretary Gomulka, explaining how anti-Semitism was more and more used for political acquire by the Communist regime. Jewish residents had been faraway from high-ranking state positions, and plenty of opted to depart for Israel, Denmark, Sweden and America. The state denied Trepper the posh of leaving his homeland.

The Massive Chief’s opening chapter, entitled ’A Reportage’, follows French journalist Pierre Elkabbach as he arrives in Poland in 1972 to interview Trepper. His footage is confiscated earlier than he leaves and believed destroyed, earlier than being subsequently found in Polish archives. We are able to now see his photographs of drab metropolis streets the place residents conceal their faces from the digicam’s gaze. Elkabbach and his staff are conscious they’re being adopted and are inspired to movie official rallies populated by enthusiastic crowds and dancers in nationwide costume. We are able to additionally see excerpts from the hour-long interview with Trepper who claims that he was by no means a spy however was “energetic in Nazi occupied France and Belgium”.

Within the second chapter, we learn the way Trepper arrived in Brussels to determine The Pink Orchestra, a community reporting to Soviet Russia because the clouds of warfare gathered in Europe. He established a small export/import firm, made pals and contacts. The knowledge he offered is claimed to have been chargeable for 300,000 German casualties. Trepper was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1942 and subsequently labored for the Germans. There’s some debate over whether or not he was a double-agent and the way he survived when others had been tortured and killed. Trepper’s story is filled with surprising twists from his return to Moscow in 1945 and subsequent arrest and imprisonment by Stalin’s regime, to his place in Nineteen Seventies Poland the place he was refused permission to hitch his household in Jerusalem.

The footage is extraordinary all through,  balancing determined moments in peculiar wartime lives – the seek for meals, executions and hangings – with glimpses of the period’s most infamous leaders, whether or not an off-duty Hitler or Stalin’s physique mendacity in state. They supply the vivid background while a number of interviews permit Trepper’s personal phrases to stipulate the place he matches in that larger fresco of worldwide occasions.

Wolski contains poignant then and now interviews with, amongst others, Elkabbach ( who died in 2023), Trepper’s lawyer Daniel Soulez-Lariviere (who died in 2022) and journalist Gilles Perrault (who died in 2023) who revealed the ebook L’Orchestre Rouge in 1967.

Trepper is seen as an affable household man, dedicated to his spouse Luba and youngsters, and but there may be nonetheless one thing basically enigmatic about him. Wolski devotes the movie’s remaining chapter to a number of strong tv debates during which Trepper defends himself in opposition to hostile people who assert that his anti-fascist heroism was extra self-serving. The matter isn’t fully resolved, however Trepper stays a captivating, Zelig-like determine.