The Debt is based on the true story of two young Warsaw businessmen, Artur Brylinski and Slawomir Sikora, who in the early 1990s were terrorized and tortured by gangster Grzegorz Gmitrzak. After promising to help them secure a loan, he instead extorted repayment of a fictitious debt. Unable to get help from the police or prosecutors, Brylinski and Sikora killed Gmitrzak and his bodyguard on the night of March 8-9, 1994. In 1997, both were sentenced to 25 years in prison. That same year, director Krzysztof Krauze met with them to gather material for a film intended to help rehabilitate their image.
The film closely reconstructs the events leading up to the crime, though some details were changed: the characters' names were altered, the harassment was shortened, the number of perpetrators reduced, and some extreme acts of torture omitted to keep the story believable.
