‘The Big Chief’ review: Close-up on controversial Red Army spy Leopold Trepper

Dir/scr: Tomasz Wolski. Poland/Netherlands/France. 2025. 88mins

Caught in the crosshairs of history, Polish-Israeli communist Leopold Trepper went from hero to outcast. Tomasz Wolski’s eye-opening The Big Chief deploys a wealth of expertly edited archive material to chart Trepper’s journey from mastermind of the wartime Soviet intelligence network The Red Orchestra to house arrest in 1970s Poland. His lengthy spells at the mercy of state oppression and anti-Semitism place him firmly in the tumult of twentieth century politics, and make for a documentary as gripping as any John Le Carre fiction. 

As gripping as any John Le Carre fiction

Wolski has built a reputation for his creative use of archive material to illuminate key moments in Poland’s past, most recently in 1970 (2021) and A Year In The Life Of A Country (2024), which covered the imposition of martial law in 1981. The Big Chief is no exception but extends the reach to encompass an impressive global array of both black and white and colour footage from such diverse sources as Eva Braun’s home movies, Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral (2019) and a variety of news agencies. 

He begins by providing some context to 1960s Poland, under First Secretary Gomulka, explaining how anti-Semitism was increasingly used for political gain by the Communist regime. Jewish citizens were removed from high-ranking state positions, and many opted to leave for Israel, Denmark, Sweden and America. The state denied Trepper the luxury of leaving his homeland.

The Big Chief’s opening chapter, entitled ’A Reportage’, follows French journalist Pierre Elkabbach as he arrives in Poland in 1972 to interview Trepper. His footage is confiscated before he leaves and believed destroyed, before being subsequently discovered in Polish archives. We can now see his shots of drab city streets where citizens hide their faces from the camera’s gaze. Elkabbach and his team are aware they are being followed and are encouraged to film official rallies populated by enthusiastic crowds and dancers in national costume. We can also see excerpts from the hour-long interview with Trepper who claims that he was never a spy but was “active in Nazi occupied France and Belgium”.

In the second chapter, we learn how Trepper arrived in Brussels to establish The Red Orchestra, a network reporting to Soviet Russia as the clouds of war gathered in Europe. He established a small export/import company, made friends and contacts. The information he provided is said to have been responsible for 300,000 German casualties. Trepper was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1942 and subsequently worked for the Germans. There is some debate over whether he was a double-agent and how he survived when others were tortured and killed. Trepper’s story is full of unexpected twists from his return to Moscow in 1945 and subsequent arrest and imprisonment by Stalin’s regime, to his position in 1970s Poland where he was refused permission to join his family in Jerusalem.

The footage is extraordinary throughout,  balancing desperate moments in ordinary wartime lives – the search for food, executions and hangings – with glimpses of the era’s most notorious leaders, whether an off-duty Hitler or Stalin’s body lying in state. They provide the vivid background whilst multiple interviews allow Trepper’s own words to outline where he fits in that bigger fresco of global events.

Wolski includes poignant then and now interviews with, among others, Elkabbach ( who died in 2023), Trepper’s lawyer Daniel Soulez-Lariviere (who died in 2022) and journalist Gilles Perrault (who died in 2023) who published the book L’Orchestre Rouge in 1967.

Trepper is seen as an affable family man, devoted to his wife Luba and children, and yet there is still something essentially enigmatic about him. Wolski devotes the film’s final chapter to a selection of robust television debates in which Trepper defends himself against hostile individuals who assert that his anti-fascist heroism was more self-serving. The matter is never completely resolved, but Trepper remains a fascinating, Zelig-like figure.