Expanding Boundaries in Poland : Film: The fact that the Polish government gave permission to shoot ‘Eminent Domain,’ an anti-communist work, indicates how times have changed.

Eminent domain, strictly speaking, is a legal term--an elegant euphemism for the right of the state to appropriate all property within its frontiers. As applied in Communist countries before the dramatic events of recent months, eminent domain also included the lives, emotions and hopes of the people who lived there.

Now, it is the title of a film being made by an international cast and crew looking at events in Poland that could not have possibly been looked at from inside that country . . . until now.

“Eminent Domain,” which is being directed by an Englishman from a script written by a Polish-American, with financing from a Japanese company and starring Donald Sutherland and Anne Archer, is the story of a Communist Party official who has been deemed by the Party as a “non-person” and, in planning his escape from the country, has to deal with the threat of betrayal from those closest to him.

The film is based on fact: much of what happens on screen actually took place in the family of screenwriter Androej Krakowski, whose father was high up in the Polish government and then became a non-person--not once, but twice. Krakowski is now an American citizen living in Upstate New York. He was one of the writers of “Triumph of the Spirit,” which was set in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

The fact that the current government of Poland gave permission for the film to be shot entirely in the country shows vividly how things have changed behind that jagged line for so long known as the Iron Curtain. It is the first time such a film has been made.

Six years ago when the producer Shimon Arama and Krakowski first started to look for locations they focused on Munich, Berlin, Stockholm, even the Irish capital of Dublin. Then suddenly there was a change. Poland could be used and a studio was even available for $15 a day, a good deal even if neither electricity nor equipment came with it. The unit settled on two stages and provided their own ice box for food and furniture for the office.

The director, John Irvin (“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”), is English, and stars Donald Sutherland and Anne Archer are Americans. The cast also includes 14-year-old Johdi May, who portrayed Barbara Hershey’s daughter in the internationally acclaimed anti-apartheid film, “A World Apart.”

The budget is $7.5 million, a half or a third as much as it would have been had “Eminent Domain” been filmed in Paris, and considerably less even than it would have cost in Yugoslavia where government subsidies to filmmakers are generous. The money comes from Japanese electronics giant Sony, through a New York subsidiary, in a venture being done completely outside its Columbia Pictures operation in Hollywood.

Even now, Irvin finds it difficult to believe he has actually been allowed to take his cameras into Poland and shoot the film.

“I wake up every morning thinking, this can’t be true,” he said. “The first week I really thought a group of sinister men would arrive one day and say, ‘Can we have your film? Get to the airport and get out.’ Two years ago, it just wouldn’t have been possible at all.”

For Androej Krakowski, the realization is even stranger. His father, Jozef, had been a Resistance fighter during the war and then became an official high up in the Polish government.

“Twice he was removed from high positions and became a non-person,” Krakowski said. “The first time was when he was commissar for food, but he refused an order to nationalize all the butchers’ shops because he said then there would be no meat.

“My father told me of the case of a friend who had actually been minister of agriculture and ruined all the agriculture in Poland. So they made him minister of culture instead. That is what it was like. The first time my father became a non-person I was only 3, but it happened again when I was 10 and I remember it well.

“My father had become head of tourism at this time and he was told to prepare a list of Jews to be purged. My father was Jewish, my mother was not. He refused. He was arrested between his house and his office. I came home to find the police searching our home.

“He was imprisoned for months. They charged him with just about everything. The irony was that they couldn’t say officially it was because he had refused to get rid of the Jews. They claimed that the car he had, one of the two Mercedes in the country at the time, was a result of currency fraud. In fact it was a gift from the prime minister of the time.”

The emotional price was a high one. In 1968, both the father and his son were permitted to leave the country. But Krakowski’s mother, only 43, died in Poland. “She lost her will to live,” he said simply. “In the film story the wife and mother doesn’t (lose her will). Once you lose your will, you are gone. For me it is a very personal story. It is how we survived when everything was taken away. You survive with honesty and integrity in the family. My parents never hid anything from me. What they cannot take away from you, they said, is what you have seen, learned and experienced yourself.

“I could come back to Poland for the first time four years ago. And the biggest change I see is that not much has changed. Officially, it is a different country and the laws are different. Yet the feeling of self-control and self-consciousness lingers on. People still don’t say what they really mean.”

Some things come as a shock to the writer. His grandmother, who was not Jewish, had been a Polish Resistance heroine during the war, he said. She was captured and sent to Auschwitz. Years after the war was over, Krakowski said he was informed by the German authorities that his grandmother had died on July 23, 1943.

When “Triumph of the Spirit” was being made, Krakowski visited the site of the concentration camp and the director of the museum there handed him his grandmother’s file, which explained how she was put to death because she had been a Resistance fighter. “She was put to death in the flames in front of all the other inmates,” he said. “She was burned alive.”

Her grandson still shivers telling the story. Memories affect everyone. When the present Ministry of Finance was decked out with huge red banners and a gigantic portrait of Lenin for a scene, passers-by stopped in agitated disbelief. In the shipyards of Gdansk, now under threat of closure, the dock workers had a meeting when they saw the old name Lenin go up again. One scene was shot in the Rakowiek jail where Krakowski’s father was imprisoned. It was the first time he had seen the cell.

When there is a couple of days’ break in the filming, Sutherland and Archer try to get away from the set.

“At first when you come to Poland, you see just the grayness and the somber mood of the people,” said Archer. “Could I survive if something happened to me as it does to the wife in ‘Eminent Domain’? I have the strength to fight, but I would be permanently scarred and bitter.

“The relationship between the husband and wife in the story is an Old World one--not Western. She is not a career woman as we understand it in the West. She exists through him and yet she rules the integrity of his life. She rules his soul.

“The strain is that he has given her a way of life which is suddenly taken away. When he falls into disfavor, their life descends into a living hell. But they survive and they do make it through to the end. It is a love story set against huge political drama. Audiences, I think, are more mature now and we are returning to a certain profundity in films. That is what interests me in this story.”

In Paris for two days, Archer said she just checked into a hotel “where all the buttons worked”--and where she could get her clothes properly washed or dry cleaned, and it was a pleasure just to look into shop windows without lines of people anywhere in sight.

“The Poles have everything, so the joke goes here, but they have it only once,” Archer said.

Irvin said he has found something else during the filming. “From the Polish crew, I got the feeling that they were asking why they couldn’t have made their own story themselves . . . why did it take an American company to come here and do it?”

For the director, there was further irony. Irvin’s father had designed ships in the North of England until his shipyard was put out of business by the Poles in Gdansk. “And now their own shipyard is expected to close at the end of the year. My father would have appreciated the sadness of that had he lived to see me filming in Gdansk now.”

Shimon Arama, the producer (an Israeli with an American wife who lives in Los Angeles), said: “It was while I was preparing ‘Triumph of the Spirit’ that I decided I would have to make ‘Eminent Domain’ because in a sense it is the continuation of the same story, but with different enemies. There is still fear, but the spirit survives.”

John Irvin added: “In Hollywood you can become a non-person overnight, too. Only there, you wake up to find it is your studio parking space that has gone and your name has been painted out.”