“The Coldest Game” (“Ukryta gra”, 2019)

The work

The film was directed by Łukasz Kośmicki, who wrote the screenplay with Marcel Sawicki. It was produced by Watchout Productions and is distributed by Next Film; it opened in Polish cinemas on 8 November 2019. It runs for 95 minutes and was made in English.^1,2

In outline, US intelligence abducts the mathematician Joshua Mansky, who is to play a Soviet chess champion at the Palace of Culture and Science; the match is cover for an intelligence operation.²

Filming took place from February to mid-April 2018, partly at the Palace of Culture and Science; the working title was “Zimna gra” (“The Cold Game”). The cinematographer was Paweł Edelman and the production designer Allan Starski. Bill Pullman plays Mansky, who stands in for the champion John Konigsberg, who died three days earlier; Yevgeny Sidikhin plays the Soviet grandmaster Aleksandr Gavrilov, and Robert Więckiewicz the director of the Palace. The characters speak mainly English, with some Polish and Russian.⁴

The real background: the Cuban Missile Crisis

On 14 October 1962 an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft photographed Soviet medium-range missile sites under construction in Cuba; the photographs reached the White House the following day. According to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the thirteen days of the crisis are counted from 16 October, when they were shown to the President.^3,5

On 22 October Kennedy announced on television a naval “quarantine” of Cuba – the word was used instead of “blockade” for legal reasons; the legal basis was Proclamation 3504.^3,5

On 27 October a U-2 was shot down over Cuba and its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson Jr., was killed. That evening Robert Kennedy met secretly with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin: the USSR was to withdraw the missiles under UN supervision, and the USA was to pledge not to invade Cuba and, in a separate, secret understanding, to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey in due course.⁶

On 28 October Khrushchev announced that the missiles would be dismantled. The USA ended the quarantine on 20 November, and the Jupiter missiles were removed from Turkey in April 1963. One result of the crisis was the “hotline” between the White House and the Kremlin.³

What is accurate

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesThe time frame – October 1962 – and the atmosphere of extreme tension between the superpowers, in which imagery intelligence (the U-2 photographs) played a part, are historically accurate. The director told PAP that the film draws analogies with today’s tension between East and West.^3,4

What was added or changed

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesŁukasz Kośmicki told PAP that his inspiration was the Palace of Culture itself – “a magical, dark Gotham City” – and that the clash of the superpowers is only one layer of the film; for him chess is a cover for telling a different story. He did not present the plot as based on fact.⁴

Neither the distribution materials nor the filmmakers’ statements that we have found point to a real-life model. We have found no source confirming a chess match in Warsaw linked to an intelligence operation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, so we treat it as fiction. Historically, the crisis was resolved by negotiations between Kennedy and Khrushchev, not by an operation in Poland.^1,2,6