Andrzej Wajda | WatchedThis
Andrzej Wajda
Directing
Biography
Andrzej Wajda (born 6 March 1926) was a Polish film director. Recipient of an honorary Oscar, he was possibly the most prominent member of the unofficial "Polish Film School" (active circa 1955 to 1963). He was known especially for a trilogy of war films: A Generation (1954), Kanał (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958). Four of his movies were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: The Promised Land (1975), The Maids of Wilko (1979), Man of Iron (1981), and Katyń (2007). He passed away in 2016 at the age of 90. Description above from the Wikipedia article Andrzej Wajda, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Signed: Andrzej Wajda
Primo Levi's Journey
In February, 1945, Primo Levi (1919-1987) and other Auschwitz survivors set off for home. The journey took more then eight months. Sixty years later, a film crew retraces Levi's steps. Levi's words, mainly from "The Truce" (1963), tell us what he experienced. In turn, we see Poland's hollow post-war factories, nationalism in the Ukraine, Soviet-style Communism in Belarus, the abandoned town of Prypiat (Chernobyl), poverty and emigration from Moldavia, Italian factories in Romania, and on across Hungary and Slovakia to Munich where Levi's rage found no listeners. Then home to Turin. An aged Mario Rigoni Stern remembers his friend. What has changed? Some issues of the war remain unsettled.
I Have Lived Seventeen Times
The main character of "Żyłem siedemnaście razy" reflects on his childhood in Gwoździec and tells a story about the beginning of his career as a filmmaker.
Without Anesthesia
A famous Polish journalist presents a problem for the powers-that-be when he displays his full political skill and knowledge on a television show featuring questions and answers on a world conference by a panel of journalists. His enemies take away his privileges when he is away. The shock of being "unwanted" parallels a deeper disappointment in his private life: his wife has an affair with a jealous young rival, and after 15 years of marriage and two daughters wants a divorce. She offers no explanations as he tries to untie these problems himself. All the moves he makes are the wrong ones. He takes on drinking heavily with students eager to attend his seminar after discovering the class has been canceled. The journalist, once suave and commanding, is reduced to silence.
On The Set
Reportage from the set of the film "Everything for Sale", focusing on the director - Andrzej Wajda. At one stage of the filming, Wajda planned to include all the documentary material shot by Ziarnik in his film. Ultimately, however, he changed the concept.
Tren na śmierć cenzora
The film reveals the mechanisms of the communist institution of censorship. Famous filmmakers - Kazimierz Kutz, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Filip Bajon and Marcel Lozinski - talk about their contacts and experiences with censors, how their films were censored, what parts were considered contrary to the ideology of the socialist state. These interferences were often of an absurd nature. At the same time, the filmmakers mention how much of the intended content they managed to smuggle out. The film is also an attempt to analyze and summarize the role of censorship in a totalitarian state and its impact on culture and art.
Samosiuk. The Independent Film Republic
The film is a portrait of Zygmunt Samosiuk, a great forgotten cinematographer, who died in 1983. As a director of photography he worked on such films as The Birch Wood, Landscape Afterthe Battle and Austeria. He introduced, among others, hand‑held camera shots, colour lights and shooting at minimum exposure. Reminiscences of his colleagues and friends, including Andrzej Wajda and Piotr Szulkin, show a gifted artist and a modest man who valued his work above all.
Last Pictures
Andrzej Munk was one of the leading directors in Polish cinema. Friends and collaborators share their memories about this stunning artist and his premature tragic death.
Screen Tests
Three-part film centered around a film being made by a group of young directors. In the first a working-class girl finishes school and has her first love affair, which ends badly. In the second a provincial boy with dreams of life in the theater has an affair with his boss' wife. They meet during the film's screen tests.
Production
Man of Iron
In Warsaw in 1980, the Communist Party sends disgruntled radio reporter Winkel to Gdańsk to dig up dirt on the shipyard strikers - particularly on Maciek Tomczyk, an independent labour union leader whose father was killed in the December 1970 protests. Posing as sympathetic, Winkel interviews the people surrounding Tomczyk, including his detained wife, Agnieszka.
Man of Marble
A young Polish filmmaker sets out to find out what happened to Mateusz Birkut, a bricklayer who became a propaganda hero in the 1950s but later fell out of favor and disappeared.
The Promised Land
In nineteenth-century Łódź, Poland, three friends want to make a lot of money by building and investing in a textile factory. An exceptional portrait of rapid industrial expansion is shown through the eyes of one Polish town.
The Promised Land
In nineteenth-century Łódź, Poland, three friends want to make a lot of money by building and investing in a textile factory. An exceptional portrait of rapid industrial expansion is shown through the eyes of one Polish town.
Danton
Danton and Robespierre were close friends and fought together in the French Revolution, but by 1793 Robespierre was France's ruler, determined to wipe out opposition with a series of mass executions that became known as the Reign of Terror. Danton, well known as a spokesman of the people, had been living in relative solitude in the French countryside, but he returned to Paris to challenge Robespierre's violent rule and call for the people to demand their rights. Robespierre, however, could not accept such a challenge, even from a friend and colleague, and he blocked out a plan for the capture and execution of Danton and his allies.
A Love in Germany
In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers' arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.
A Love in Germany
In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers' arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.
The Last Days
Romance brings two warring families together in this historical drama. As citizens fight for independence in 1810s Lithuania, Tadeusz, the son of a murderer, and Zosia, a young woman, come together for a wedding against a backdrop of changing politics, ancient traditions, and the uncertain future of a country.
The Last Days
Romance brings two warring families together in this historical drama. As citizens fight for independence in 1810s Lithuania, Tadeusz, the son of a murderer, and Zosia, a young woman, come together for a wedding against a backdrop of changing politics, ancient traditions, and the uncertain future of a country.
Ashes and Diamonds
A young academy soldier, Maciek Chelmicki, is ordered to shoot the secretary of the KW PPR. A coincidence causes him to kill someone else. Meeting face to face with his victim, he gets a shock. He faces the necessity of repeating the assassination. He meets Krystyna, a girl working as a barmaid in the restaurant of the "Monopol" hotel. His affection for her makes him even more aware of the senselessness of killing at the end of the war. Loyalty to the oath he took, and thus the obligation to obey the order, tips the scales.
Gallery
