Andrzej Wajda

Quote:
It’s 1900, and for the last 130 years Poland has been wiped off the map of Europe; it’s still occupied by three invaders: Russia, Austria and Prussia. In a village near Cracow, a wedding takes place between a poet from the city and a country girl. The intelligentsia celebrates alongside the peasantry, but this is the full extent of any “agreement” between these two social classes, and the wedding guests are made aware of it by visiting apparitions. The chance for a national uprising is duly lost.Read More »

The disappearance of the leading actor from a film’s set worries its director Andrzej. He embarks on a journey to search for him, accompanied by a young actor, the missing actor’s wife, and his mistress.

Quote:
Andrzej Wajda’s film from 1969 is an homage to his friend Zbigniew Cybulski, who died tragically. It’s probably the most famous Polish ‘film about film’.Read More »

Quote:
Set in the late ’20s. A thirtyish young man, who heads a small factory, faints at the funeral of a close friend. He decides to go home to his aunt and uncle for a while, but gets involved with a family of five women who had been in love with him at one time though he had apparently loved only one, who, unknown to him, has died since his departure. The women are mainly disillusioned with life or estranged from husbands while the youngest has a crush on him.Read More »

Based on the story by Stanislaw Lem, Layer Cake is about a racing car driver who undergoes so many transplants that it can no longer be determined which people have contributed to his make-up.Read More »

As WWII and the German occupation ends, the Polish resistance and the Russian forces turn on each other in an attempt to take over leadership in Communist Poland.Read More »

Quote:
While he’s exercising filmmaking muscles that are mighty spry for a 90-year-old, no one will mistake Andrzej Wajda’s latest feature for an expression of joie de vivre: “Afterimage” is a somber portrait of a Polish artist who, unlike his portraitist here, was defeated by the fickle shifts of political ideology imposed on art. This respectable if somewhat monotonous drama won’t be an easy sell to offshore audiences for whom its subject, avant-garde artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski is hardly a household name. Moreover the film references his defining triumphs just in passing, focusing instead on bleak later years when he was persecuted for failing to tow the Party aesthetic line. The result is another significant chapter in Polish history from Wajda, albeit one unlikely to travel as widely as some of his past subjects.Read More »

The depiction of the life of Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Poland’s Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, as events in the 1970s lead to a peaceful revolution.

Quote:
Wałęsa, an electrician at the Gdańsk Shipyards, participated in local demonstrations during the 1970s. Following the bloody aftermath, which remains with Wałęsa, he concentrates on his day-to-day duties. Ten years later, a new uprising occurs and he becomes an unexpected and charismatic leader of Polish dockworkers.Read More »

Quote:
Wajda’s remarkable sequel to Man of Marble welds newsreel footage of the Solidarity strike to fiction in a strong investigative drama. A disillusioned, vodka-sodden radio producer is bundled off to Gdansk in a black limousine. His mission: to smear one of the main activists – who also happens to be the son of the hapless ‘Marble’ worker-hero. But, tempered by bitter experience of the failed reforms of ’68 and ’70, these new men of iron are more durable than their fathers, not as easily smashed. Media cynicism, censorship and corruption are again dominant themes, this time anchored through the TV coverage of the strike, though the conclusion hints with guarded optimism at a possible rapprochement between workers and intelligentsia. An urgent, nervy narrative conveys all the exhilaration and bewilderment of finding oneself on the very crestline of crucial historical change; and for the viewer, all the retrospective melancholy of knowing that euphoria shattered by subsequent events.Read More »

Plot
In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers’ arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.

Nominated
Venice Film Festival – Golden Lion – 1983Read More »