Synopsis:
Set in the summer months preceding the September 1939 outbreak of World War II in Polish part of Lithuania. A young highschool lad, Witek, is hoping to pass the entrance exams to the university. His love interest is Alina, his high-school colleague.Read More »
Quote:
Andrzej Wajda’s Krajobraz po bitwie / Landscape After the Battle was a ground-breaking film discussing the personal stories of the inmates of a WW-II camp. The film also draws inspiration from one of Poland’s most iconic paintings.
The screenplay was mainly based on Tadeusz Borowski’s story, Bitwa pod Grunwaldem / The Battle for Grunwald, as well as, to a lesser extent, on a few other stories by the author. The authors of the script were – Andrzej Brzozowski, the co-writer of, among others, Pasażerka by Andrzej Munk and a known film documentarian, as well as Andrzej Wajda.Read More »
Quote:
It’s 1900, and for the last 130 years Poland has been wiped off the map of Europe; it’s still occupied by three invaders: Russia, Austria and Prussia. In a village near Cracow, a wedding takes place between a poet from the city and a country girl. The intelligentsia celebrates alongside the peasantry, but this is the full extent of any “agreement” between these two social classes, and the wedding guests are made aware of it by visiting apparitions. The chance for a national uprising is duly lost.Read More »
The disappearance of the leading actor from a film’s set worries its director Andrzej. He embarks on a journey to search for him, accompanied by a young actor, the missing actor’s wife, and his mistress.
Quote:
Andrzej Wajda’s film from 1969 is an homage to his friend Zbigniew Cybulski, who died tragically. It’s probably the most famous Polish ‘film about film’.Read More »
Quote:
Set in the late ’20s. A thirtyish young man, who heads a small factory, faints at the funeral of a close friend. He decides to go home to his aunt and uncle for a while, but gets involved with a family of five women who had been in love with him at one time though he had apparently loved only one, who, unknown to him, has died since his departure. The women are mainly disillusioned with life or estranged from husbands while the youngest has a crush on him.Read More »
Based on the story by Stanislaw Lem, Layer Cake is about a racing car driver who undergoes so many transplants that it can no longer be determined which people have contributed to his make-up.Read More »
Quote:
On the last day of World War Two in a small town somewhere in Poland, Polish exiles of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of a new day and a new Poland. In this incendiary environment we find Home Army soldier Maciek Chelmicki, who has been ordered to assassinate an incoming commissar. But a mistake stalls his progress and leads him to Krystyna, a beautiful barmaid who gives him a glimpse of what his life could be. Gorgeously photographed and brilliantly performed, Ashes and Diamonds masterfully interweaves the fate of a nation with that of one man, resulting in one of the most important Polish films of all time.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:
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 »