The Dead Class (1975), by Tadeusz Kantor and the Cricot 2 company, is considered one of the most innovative and influential works of twentieth-century theatre. The breakthrough first version of the production – performed to great critical acclaim, but only rarely seen live by audiences outside Poland – was documented on film in 1976 by the Oscar-winning director Andrzej Wajda.Read More »
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The authors decidedly refute the myth of the woman – guardian of the hearth. Their heroine is a modern and an energetic girl who demands her partners to be successful in every field. A beginning writer and translator, running from his wife and mother-in-law, falls into her trap. What happens to a sensitive man in an encounter with overwhelming female force?Read More »
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I wasn’t satisfied with the first two versions of the script which I had commissioned in Warsaw.
Luckily for me, at that time Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita was first published in Poland. I was thrilled by it. I realized that I would not find a better text for the film than the story of Pilate. Everything was there: Christ, Pilate’s dark intrigue, Judas’ betrayal and the desperate loneliness of the single disciple and Evangelist.Read More »
Poland, during the World War. Lotna is a magnificent specimen of Arabian horse, the
pride of her owner, too old to actually ride her but to whom she remains faithful
nevertheless. The Polish cavalry army is also proud of their land, and loyal to rules, and
custom. The German army is leading an overwhelming speed attack with tanks, an
almost unheard of weapon, and bringing a way of life to an end. It’s the last battle
between Lotna (speed horse) and Blitzkriega (speed war).Read More »
Nominated for the Golden Lion in 1961 at the venice Film festival
“Samson” is the story of a Jew, Jakub Gold (Serge Merlin), at the polytechnic university in Warsaw imprisoned and sentenced to 10 years for accidentally killing his friend in German- occupied Poland. In prison he makes several contacts that will factor later in the movie. The prisoners are released when Warsaw is bombed. Jakub is sent to the Warsaw ghetto where the Jews are “doomed to death for the crime of existence” and is assigned to picking up corpses from the streets and helping to provide them with a Jewish burial. Along the way he picks up his own mother. After one such burial Jakub and another man escape from the ghetto. After he escapes he desires to go back into the ghetto to share the fate of his kinsmen. Read More »
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A young commander of Warsaw Uprising tries to continue his activity under conditions of Soviet occupation. He makes contact with an insurgent from the People’s Army, now the head of the regional committee of the PPR. In the mask of a collaborator he wants to save the rest of his people.
The screenplay was based on Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski’s novel “Pierścionek z końskiego włosia” / “The Horsehair Ring”, withheld by the censors in 1965 and first published in 1991. Wajda included in the film a scene modeled on the famous scene with spirit lamps from “Ashes and Diamonds” (1958). (1958), in the vicinity of a meeting between Marcin and Wiśka, who are awaiting the outcome of talks between the PPR and AK (Home Army).Read More »
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Best known for political films such as Ashes and Diamonds and A Generation, Polish director Andrzej Wajda travels to 18th-century Paris in Danton — but his politics remain firmly grounded in the 20th century. Much like his most recent film Katyn, which chronicled the murder of 15,000 Polish officers by the Soviets during World War II, Danton takes us to the morning after the French Revolution, when the monarchy has been toppled and the revolutionaries have no one left to fight but themselves.Read More »
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Gérard Depardieu and Wojciech Pszoniak star in Andrzej Wajda’s powerful, intimate depiction of the ideological clash between the earthy, man-of-the-people Georges Danton and icy Jacobin extremist Maximilien Robespierre, both key figures of the French Revolution. By drawing parallels to Polish “solidarity,” a movement that was being quashed by the government as the film went into production, Wajda drags history into the present. Meticulous and fiery, Danton has been hailed as one of the greatest films ever made about the Terror.Read More »
Fleeing from despair after losing those dearest to him, the hero hides in a safe land of memories, where time stands still and all those dear to him are alive.
5 wins & 4 nominationsRead More »