The first of Polish director Andrzej Wajda's two "Solidarity" films, Man of Marble (originally Czlowiek z Marmuru) concerns bricklayer Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz). Lauded as a national hero in the 1950s due to his skills at his trade, Birkut has inexplicably fallen into obscurity. In making a film of the bricklayer's life, documentary ...
The second of Polish director Andrzej Wajda's WWII trilogy, following Pokolenie (A Generation) and preceding Popiol I diament (Ashes and Diamonds), Kanal is the most physically harrowing of the set. Based on the experiences of Jerzy Stefan Stawinski, a Polish patriot who participated in the battle for Warsaw in 1939 as an 18-year-old and in the ...
Polish director Andrzej Wajda had a habit of switching gears between socially conscious films and pure box-office entertainments. The Conductor, released in Poland in 1979 as Dyrygent, falls into the latter category. John Gielgud stars as an old and venerated orchestra conductor, making his annual personal appearance in a small Polish town. ...
One of the most important figures in the Polish cinema, director Andrzej Wajda, teams up with the nation's most famous filmmaking expatriate, Roman Polanski, in this light comedy based on a perennially popular stage farce by Aleksandr Fredo. Czesnik (Janusz Gajos) and Rejent (Andrzej Seweryn) are the combative scions of two prominent families ...
A few years after director Akira Kurosawa released the Japanese version (Throne of Blood) of Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, Andrzej Wajda, for his first project outside of Poland, directed Siberska Ledi Magbet/Siberian Lady Macbeth. This particular version-of-two-versions was based on the 1865 novel Ledi Makbet Mtsenkogo Uyezda/Lady Macbeth of the ...
Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda adapted his 1975 effort Land of Promise (Ziemia Obiecana) from an 1897 novel by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont. The story concerns three Polish laborers of vastly different social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. Unlike many of their recalcitrant contemporaries, the three men are able to overcome their differences and ...
Polish director Andrej Wajda's portrait of life on a movie set, which is disrupted (although not that much) when the leading man is killed in a leap from a moving train. It seems that the temperamental, unreliable star was always late anyway, so the shooting goes on without him, his character's absence being explained away in the script by the ...
Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda directs the psychological drama Panny z Wilka (released in the U.S. as The Young Girls of Wilko), based on the book by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz. Set in the 1920s, WWI veteran Wiktor Ruben (Daniel Olbrychski) returns to the town where he had spent his childhood summers before the war. He stays with his aunt (Zofia ...
Based on the writings of Tadeusz Borowski, a child survivor of Auschwitz who committed suicide at 29, this is the story of two concentration camp survivors. A sensitive young poet is approached by a pretty Jewish girl with a plan to move to the West. Fueled by hatred over his experience in prison, he is reluctant to go and seeks revenge on his ...
Two years after winning the Special Jury Prize for Kanal at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, renowned Polish director Andrzej Wajda directed this allegorical World War II drama. The film follows the winding paths of Lotna, a snow-white mare, as she wanders through Poland during it's fight against the Nazis in 1939. As the poorly-equipped Poles wage ...
Jerzy Michalowski is a journalist who has been licensed by the Polish State to travel abroad. He researches stories and at the same time represents the country in journalistic circles. When, on a foreign broadcast, he displays a much too-thorough knowledge of the actual state of affairs inside Poland, the authorities decide to punish him by ...
Legendary Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda adapts a nationally treasured epic poem to the silver screen. For 400 years, Lithuania and Poland were linked, until the country was partitioned in 1795 by aggressive nations at its borders -- Russia, Prussia, and the Austrian empire. At that point, the formerly huge nation simply ceased to exist. Yet one ...
Based on a non-fiction bestseller of the same name by Rolf Hochhuth, Eine Liebe In Deutschland is about a tragic and forbidden love affair between Stanislaw, a Polish POW (Piotr Lysak) and Paulina (Hanna Schygulla) a fruit-and-vegetable vendor in a small town in Germany along the border with Switzerland. Their affair would have gone undetected ...
In this Polish family drama, set in the pre-World War II era, a young man dying of tuberculosis returns to his older brother's farm in the countryside. His presence there heightens and then heals conflicts of long standing. The younger brother is too full of life to die before his time; he makes love to a farm girl, plays the piano, and generally ...
Nominated for the Golden Palm at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, this comedy from Polish director Andrzej Wajda stars Zygmunt Malanowicz as Wlodek, a young man stuck in a dead-end job at the local library who lives with his harridan wife and critical in-laws in a small apartment. When Wlodek draws the interest of a library patron, the beautiful ...
The life of Polish pediatrician Janusz Korczak (Wojtek Pszoniak) is the subject of Andrzej Wajda'a docudrama. Also known as an author who wrote primarily for young readers, Korczak's name became legend as a result of the Jewish orphanage he established in Warsaw. When the invasion of the Nazis in 1939 forced him to move his students to the ghetto, ...
Originally running 234 minutes long and filmed in black-and-white CinemaScope, Popioly is Andrzej Wajda's Western-style war epic. The screenplay is based on the novel Popioly by Stefan Zeromski and adapted by Aleksander Scibor-Rylski. Set in the early 19th century, the story concerns the Polish legion led by General Dombrowski (Daniel Olbrychski), ...
Sampson is one of several Andrzej Wajda films harking back to his youth during the Nazi Occupation of Poland. Many of these concern not only the struggle between good and evil, but also between passive and impassive. The hero is a Jewish youth. He, like his family, has always been silent and undemonstrative in the face of prejudice. Now he stands ...
Award-winning Polish director Andrzej Wajda guides this effective tale about a young doctor and the woman he finds when he did not know he was looking. The doctor is attractive enough to have women after him all of the time, which may seem like a great problem for most men but is unsettling to him. Just when he has had it with women coming on to ...
This is the last film in the trilogy that began Andrzej Wajda's career as a director. Preceding this wartime drama are Pokolenie (1955) and Kanal (1957). Once again, Wajda presents a strong anti-war statement, this time in the personae of two men who are given orders on the last day of World War II in Poland to murder a leading communist. The ...
Celebrated Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda takes the helm for this Oscar-nominated drama detailing the harrowing events surrounding the 1940 massacre of captured Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest. A unique blend of conventional narrative and documentary-style filmmaking, Katyn opens in the spring of 1940, just as the Soviet Secret police ...
In 1982, legendary Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda fled his homeland and relocated in France to direct this powerful story about the ethical boundaries of power and leadership, which had many parallels to Poland's volatile political situation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Danton (Gérard Depardieu) and Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak) were close ...
A Generation is the first of Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda's "underground trilogy"-and also Wajda's first-ever feature film. Originally titled Pokolenie, the film dissects the impact that World War II had on the youth of Poland. Tadevsz Lomnicki plays an impressionable young Warsaw resident who falls in love with resistance leader Ursula ...
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