The Polish film Kler (“Clergy”) was controversial even before its release. Directed by Wojciech Smarzowski and featuring household names such as Robert Więckiewicz and Jacek Braciak, the film depicts priests struggling with vice and weakness amid a Church marked by corruption and hypocrisy.
A confrontation between the Polish Church and cultural industries was inevitable. Ida won an Oscar for its portrayal of dark chapters in the nation’s war history, but was condemned by some Poles as anti-Catholic. Kler is an explicit assault on the Church’s moral status in Poland, complete with alcoholism, fornication and child abuse. “It should be a shock,” Janusz Gajos, a veteran Polish actor who appears in the film, told TVN24. “We know of many incidents … which take place behind the Church’s curtains and whose perpetrators are then protected.”
