life's debt

The Eighth Commandment is a story about guilt and retribution. Forty years ago, Sophia, a female professor, used the Ten Commandments, "Do not falsely testify," and refused to help a Jewish girl. Fortunately, the girl was finally rescued by a kind tailor who hid her and survived. . The Gestapo is about to start a manhunt and must get her a fake birth certificate, and the tailor finds a young Catholic couple. When the appointed time came, the couple looked hesitant, and finally, the wife said, they regretted not being able to give Elizabeth a false certificate. In the end, the tailor found someone to take the child and fled Poland. For the next twenty years, Elizabeth has been living with a heavy burden. Now, when little Elizabeth has grown up, she can't forget the ruthlessness of the female professor and the kindness of the tailor, so she came back to Warsaw as a research scholar. Sadly, I unravel this dusty memory. The husband of that couple is dead, and his wife, Sophia, is a professor of philosophy at the university. Facing Elizabeth, Sophia recounts the guilt that has tormented her over the years; and when Elizabeth finds a tailor, he avoids mentioning the past, only asking her what kind of clothes she makes.
Liu Xiaofeng made an in-depth summary of Elizabeth's story: "Her life was heavy, and the grace and debt brought by her childhood experience of life and death had been in her heart for 40 years, like a faint halo, suffocating her sense of life. She feels that living in debt and kindness is an ethical inequality. Elizabeth's heart is wounded not only because she was abandoned, but also because she was rescued. The grace of others is a kind of debt, Eliza Bo feels the burden of debt..." In the movie, Elizabeth told Sophia that there are two kinds of people in this world, the giver and the giver, once she remembered the night when she was abandoned and rescued, Only shame. In a big war, I don't know how many people have suffered many scars and survived. Intellectuals such as Sophia, who teach ethics at the university, develop their minds, teach students to see things from different angles and get rid of sin, but they are always confused about what happened 40 years ago; Mr. Tailor finally continued to sew in his small shop. He doesn't want to talk about the past, the present, or the future. Life is only slowly passing by sewing clothes. History (belonging to an individual or an era) has never been an inescapable debt, and in the end, it is hard to settle.
In the grand historical background, in fact, everyone's life is worth savoring, with his secrets and exciting world. People don't talk about their lives, they're embarrassed, they don't want to open old wounds. Kieslowski felt compelled to present a reality that people don't usually see on the screen: "Our tools of description have always been used for propaganda... People outside Poland simply cannot Imagine what it means to live in a world without expression." There are only two ultimate sources of everyone's wounds: love and death.
This tendency to focus on individuals and privacy, and to reflect personal fate, most likely stems from Keith's early experience in making documentaries. Documentaries made in Key's early years, such as "Worker '71," which Key calls "the most political film," were forced to make a version "that we didn't like both in essence and in form, the way it was cut. Especially filthy and vicious", which was later reflected at considerable length in Keith's feature film "The Fan." Keith's youthful study experience made him very disgusted with institutions and constraints, so most of Keith's selected stories and characters are far from political constraints. For the Eighth Commandment, although it involves politics and society, it is not far from politics or politics in nature. Philosophy, but in Keith's eyes, he still believes that "politics don't really matter", "they [politics] are powerless to do anything or answer some of our basic, necessary questions about humanity and humanity. What is the real meaning of life? It makes no difference whether you live in a communist country or a capitalist country when it comes to questions like why you get up in the morning. Politics doesn’t answer these kinds of questions.” Keith expressed his worries and concerns about the chaos and anarchy that swept Poland at the time. Worried, Keith felt that the Polish people at the time were "very obvious in their nervousness, disillusionment and fear of something worse".

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