Andrzej Seweryn

A team of astronauts land on an inhabitable planet and form a society. Many years later, a single astronaut is sent to the planet and becomes a messiah.Read More »

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What makes life meaningful: success or love? This dilemma is faced by Joachim, a fulfilled man approaching the end of his life, and a young mathematical genius, David. This film is a return to the central themes of the director’s work. The answers he gives this time are perverse and not obvious.Read More »

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Based on a true story, this film focuses on three Polish labourers of vastly different social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. Unlike many of their recalcitrant contemporaries, the three men overcome their differences and work together. Eventually they create a textile factory founded upon the edicts of equality, trust, and respect.Read More »

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Made after THE DAMNED, but before 1900, this operatic-style melodrama, about the industrial revolution in Lodz ca. 1895, is far better than either. Like the other two films, it takes an extreme situation in history and makes it more extreme, piling on the excess. Two examples here: a garden party that’s like a Roman orgy, with naked women, tigers in cages, etc., and a scene where a worker grapples with his boss and they fall into a giant machine which instantly spews out their bodies as huge chunks of raw meat. But whereas Visconti, and, particularly, Bertolucci, ultimately drown under their excesses, Wajda maintains total control over his narrative. Read More »

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A famous Polish journalist presents a problem for the powers-that-be when he displays his full political skill and knowledge on a television show featuring questions and answers on a world conference by a panel of journalists. His enemies take away his privileges when he is away. The shock of being “unwanted” parallels a deeper disappointment in his private life: his wife has an affair with a jealous young rival, and after 15 years of marriage and two daughters wants a divorce. She offers no explanations as he tries to untie these problems himself. All the moves he makes are the wrong ones. He takes on drinking heavily with students eager to attend his seminar after discovering the class has been canceled. The journalist, once suave and commanding is reduced to silence.Read More »

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A violinist in a provincial Polish orchestra, whose husband is the director of the ensemble, on a visit to the U.S., ties up with the world-renowned symphony conductor. As it turns out, he was once in love with the violinist’s mother. The conductor, a slightly unstable hypochondriac, returns to Poland to lead the provincial orchestra. He also tries to revive an old love affair using the violinist as a surrogate of her mother. Her husband is resentful of the conductor for personal and professional reasons.Read More »

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Polish filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski is best known for his anguished monster flick Possession, which featured Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani as a married couple spiraling toward domestic meltdown. His films are aggressive shrieks of madness, doomed love, trance-state convulsions, and shrieking emotional upheavals. The octopus creature that materializes halfway through Possession, completing the film’s bizarre love triangle, transports a fairly naturalistic, if explosive, kitchen-sink drama into the realm of magical realism; Zulawski swore that his 1981 masterwork was partially autobiographical, coming as it did so soon after a vicious and harrowing divorce.Read More »