“Not just a portrait of one man, but a meditation on the mutable nature of history itself.”

Tomasz Wolski, a director well-versed in archival storytelling and historical documentary filmmaking as can be seen in his previous works like A Year in the Life of the Country (Rok z życia kraju) and 1970, returns with The Big Chief (Wielki szef), in which he assembles yet another archival puzzle, this time delving into a pivotal figure from Poland’s 20th-century history. But unlike his earlier attempts to portray broad sections of Polish society and historical memory, Wolski now narrows his focus on a curious and complex individual: Leopold Trepper, a former Red Army officer and a key player in the anti-Nazi resistance.

Oddly enough, The Big Chief resists the structure of a traditional biographical documentary. Trepper’s childhood, personal life, and family are barely touched upon. Instead, Wolski exclusively looks at Trepper’s career as a Soviet intelligence officer, particularly his espionage work during WWII and the subsequent betrayal by the very government he once served. In this way Trepper’s story becomes a conduit for Wolski to explore Poland’s communist legacy and the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the 1970s.

Trepper’s life, or at least the fragments we glimpse through Wolski’s carefully assembled montage of archival interviews and footage, serves as a microcosm of the broader historical complexities that continue to shape collective memory. As the film suggests, history is never static; it is rewritten time and again, first by the victors, and later by those seeking to reinterpret the past through the lens of contemporary politics and cultural shifts.

Consider for a moment that Trepper was part of the Soviet Army, the same force that fought against Nazism and liberated concentration camps like Auschwitz. And yet, in today’s era of instant communication, rampant misinformation, and deliberate historical revisionism, that narrative is under constant siege. Hollywood for instance has long perpetuated an American-centric version of World War II, often sidelining or simplifying the contributions of other nations. Meanwhile, social media platforms are flooded with ahistorical claims, such as the absurd notion that Nazism was a ‘leftist’ movement, a statement not only factually inaccurate but willfully ignorant of the fact that the Nazis’ earliest concentration camps were filled with communists.

In this context one must ask: how is the Red Army’s role in World War II remembered, or misremembered, in the post-Cold War and post-Soviet world? This is why telling Trepper’s story becomes, in a sense, a rich endeavor. Here is a man once celebrated as a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, who, decades later, became a target of political persecution. Despite his contributions, Trepper was stripped of his job and titles and kept under government surveillance, punished not for betrayal, but for being Jewish. In other words, he was a masterful spy during the war, only to become a subject of spying himself in peacetime.

Perhaps this is The Big Chief’s central theme: unlike fiction, history must be lived, but it is how we choose to tell it that ultimately shapes its meaning. This point is brilliantly underscored by Trepper himself, who in one interview angrily rejects being labeled a ‘spy’. To him, spying on Nazis was a moral act, or a form of resistance and activism, completely distinct from the sinister implications the term carried during and after the Cold War era.

Wolski presents the collapse of communist regimes, Poland’s in particular, through an evocative, associative collage of archival footage, creating a film that at times feels more like a Cold War spy thriller than a conventional documentary. This narrative strategy proves effective, especially for audiences unfamiliar with the intricacies of Poland’s political past or its complex relationships with both the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Much like Trepper pieced together intelligence to understand and resist Nazism, Wolski uses fragments of Trepper’s life and memory to construct a larger, more intricate historical mosaic. In doing so, The Big Chief becomes not just a portrait of one man, but a meditation on the mutable nature of history itself.