Andrzej Wajda

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 »

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Henryk Goldszmit – aka, Janusz Korczak – was born in 1878 to a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family in Warsaw. Convinced from an early age that the rights of children needed defending, he studied pediatrics and organized a number of institutions for children, including a famous orphanage that he was forced to move into the Jewish ghetto after the Nazis invaded Poland. Yet he remained convinced that even the Nazis would not harm his children. Wajda’s moving, wrenching and highly controversial portrait of Korczak ponders the fate of a kind of modern saint in a world in which evil has become the rule. Brilliantly incarnated by Wojciech Pszoniak from a script by Agnieszka Holland, Korczak both fascinates and repulses. The man’s complete, unquestionable dedication to his children is set against a refusal to understand – or perhaps accept – the reality all around him. A thoughtful, provocative work that was clearly a key influence on Schindler’s List.Read More »

Synopsis
A Generation is set in Wola, a working-class section of Warsaw, in 1942 and tells the stories of two young men at odds with the Germans occupation of Poland. The young protagonist, Stach (Tadeusz Łomnicki), is living in squalor on the outskirts of the city and carrying out wayward acts of theft and rebellion. After a friend is killed attempting to heist coal from a German supply train, he finds work as an apprentice at a furniture workshop, where he becomes involved in an underground communist resistance cell guided first by a friendly journeyman there who in turn introduces Stach to the beautiful Dorota (Urszula Modrzyńska). An outsider, Jasio Krone (Tadeusz Janczar), the temperamental son of an elderly veteran, is initially reluctant to join the struggle but finally commits himself, running relief operations in the Jewish ghetto during the uprising there.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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In 1976, a young woman in Krakow is making her diploma film, looking behind the scenes at the life of a 1950s bricklayer, Birkut, who was briefly a proletariat hero, at how that heroism was created, and what became of him. She gets hold of outtakes and censored footage and interviews the man’s friends, ex-wife, and the filmmaker who made him a hero. A portrait of Birkut emerges: he believed in the workers’ revolution, in building housing for all, and his very virtues were his undoing. Her hard-driving style and the content of the film unnerve her supervisor, who kills the project with the excuse she’s over budget. Is there any way she can push the film to completion?Read More »