Loose talk in a Warsaw restaurant brought down the Polish government, but the transcripts of those conversations, it seems, may have been made on the orders of the Kremlin. Konrad Szołajski’s investigative doc seeks to get to the heart of the matter.
It didn’t matter that the private (but not so discrete) conversations of Polish government ministers in a Warsaw restaurant were recorded illegally. When the transcripts were published, their none too parliamentary language and content outraged public opinion and eventually led to the fall of the moderate and pro‐European ruling party government, to be replaced by a far‐right populist one.
This all happened back in 2014/15, but recently journalists have begun to detect more than a whiff of skulduggery. It may well have been a case of Putin putting the boot in, they assume.
Back then, the finger of blame was initially pointed at a shady businessman (since jailed) and a pair of enthusiastic waiters who were able to operate a wire tap. But what were their motives? Why should they do it? What did they have to gain? And so independent journalists decided to take over the inquiry that was abandoned by the state authorities, starting with the question of who stood to benefit most from all this? The answer seemed obvious: the Kremlin and the PiS nationalist-clerical party, which seized power in 2015.
In the light of Putin’s attempts to influence European and global politics over past years (such as Brexit and the 2016 US elections), the doc project Waitergate is therefore “viable not only for the Polish audience, it is important for viewers in all the countries which are threatened by the phenomenon of hostile, clandestine influence aimed at dismantling the integrity of the democratic world,” the production team claims.
The project promises “a film investigation, reaching for tools which have not been used so far. We engage a group consisting of a private detective, a retired prosecutor and policeman to check whether ‘Waitergate’ could have been a political operation supposedly directed by a silent Russian – Polish right wing alliance.”
With a number of top backers on board, including co-producers Isme Film (Norway) and Hypermarket Film (Czech Republic), as well as partners in the form of SVT, DR, ERR, Al Jazeera Balkans, Creative Europe MEDIA development and Fritt Ord Foundation, the ZK Studio (Poland) production is well on its way to reaching its €287,753 budget.
During the Sunny Side pitch, the director asks rhetorically: “Until 2015, Poland was a model example of the successful transformation from communism to democracy. And suddenly it became unstable. What changed Polish voters’ political preference? What brought down the pro-EU government and gave power to that Euro-sceptical party?”
“Was all this caused only by two waiters, their boss and his brother-in-law or should we ask another question [on] who benefited from the change of power in Poland. Many traces point at the Kremlin,” muses Szołajski, adding. “The new Poland right wing government, which is ostensibly anti-Putin actually does the opposite. They have implemented a policy which seems very convenient for Putin. They question the European Union integrity and make Poland dependent on the Russian coal.”
The essence of the narrative, say the project notes, is checking the brave hypotheses and bold reporters’ conclusions joined with revealing methods of our detectives’ work.
“You can expect a thriller documentary, but on a serious subject. Our film will show the vulnerability of democracy, which can be very easily influenced by a foreign power, which uses special agents, trolls spreading fake news and a media campaign based on innuendo and lies,” Szołajski ends.
