Polish

Quote:
Set in 1936 in Poland. Zygfryd, a handsome, orphaned young circus acrobat with an introspective temperament, is under the protection of circus owner, Waldo, and his wife. A rich intellectual recluse, patron of the arts (and of young artists) stumbles into Zygfryd’s heart- stopping act and offers him his friendship. He also opens up his cultural horizons and teaches him to consciously reflect on life. It all ends in tragedy, when the boy finds that the circus life is no longer enough and falls during his act. Written by Polish Cinema DatabaseRead More »

The main character is the manager of a sport club, nicknamed “Teddy Bear” by his friends and acquaintances. One day he is detained at the border just as his sport team is off to a tournament – somebody has torn out a few pages from his passport. It occurs to him that perhaps his ex-wife has done so to get her hands on their joint account in a London bank.Read More »

Imdb:
Ewa returns to her village after a hospital stay. She works on a plantation that grows wild roses. While Ewa was away her mother has been taking care of her children Marysia and Jas. Ewa’s husband Andrzej also returns home after working for months in Norway. The time apart has created distance between them. During Marysia’s first communion, Ewa starts to feel ill. Her friend Basia drives her home. Basia admits that she leaked the gossip to Andrzej about Ewa’s affair with Marcel, a local high school boy. Ewa meets Marcel on the rose plantation. She says that their relationship is over. After Marcel leaves, Marta realizes that Jas, her 2-year-old son, has disappeared. The search begins. After hours a policeman appears and says that Jas has been found. Marta and Andrzej go to the next village and pick up Jas. Ewa returns to the hospital she left a few days before. We discover that Ewa had given birth to a child and put it up for adoption. Ewa wants her child back.Read More »

Tadeusz (Jan Kreczmar) is a Polish veteran of World War II who fled to London at the end of the war, leaving behind his wife Zofia (Irena Eichlerówna) and son, Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), who disappeared when he was 12 years old. Tadeusz returns to Kraków to discover that Maciek is alive, his wife may have been a partisan and that his son may have turned in his own mother in to the authorities. During Maciek’s struggle to understand his parents’ history, questions of collaboration with the Gestapo and Home Army retribution arise. Has pictures the mystical lost boy in a dark fairy-tale forest, full of the ghosts of the war and wholesale executions. The hypnotic quality of these excursions foreshadows the mesmerizing passages of Has’s later film, The Hour-Glass Sanatorium.Read More »

Martha Weiss, a Jew, is sent to Auschwitz concentration camp with her family. On the first day of their arrival Martha is, by a coincidence, chosen as an interpreter, but her entire family is killed. Waiting for the Red Army to deliver them from the prison camp, the film depicts Martha and her friends’ struggling life under the tyranny of camp guards and equally bad ‘capos’, administrative personnel chosen from among the prisoners.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:
Basic existential questions are asked here in the form of a street survey probe: Who are you? What is most important to you? What would you like? As a result, we see a collective portrait of Poles in 1979 – 44 people, from a one-year-old child who cannot speak yet, to a nearly hundred-year-old woman who, in turn, cannot hear, but certainly wants to live even longer. The shocking sadness of a few-year-old girl contrasts with the optimism of an old woman, the idealism of a young man contrasts with the cynicism of an old alcoholic.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 »

Quote:
Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance is a powerful political fable that provides an early glimpse at the unique style that would later lead to acclaimed international successes like the Three Colors Trilogy and The Double Life of Veronique. As with the later films, Kieslowski displays a deeply erotic, sensual sensibility and a warm humanism that inflects every facet of this complex film. He also shows signs of the spiritual outlook and interest in fate and overlapping chronologies that is especially prevalent in the films he’s best known for. Blind Chance begins with a brief, elliptical precis of the early life of Witek (Boguslaw Linda), starting with a few childhood scenes, his first love, his days in medical school, and finally the death of his father. Many of these earlier memories will later be shown to be false or at least incomplete, hazily remembered scenes from the distant past that have taken on iconic status in Witek’s mind even if the particulars aren’t quite accurate.Read More »