Andrzej Wajda
Andrzej Wajda is a Polish film director, theater director, and screenwriter born in 1926 in Suwałki. The son of an officer and a schoolteacher, he joined the Polish resistance at the age of 16 in 1942 to fight against the Soviets. At the end of the war, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, then at the National Film School in Łódź. After directing several short films, Aleksander Ford took him on as his assistant for his 1954 film The Five from Barska Street. That same year, he directed his first feature film, Generation. He made his mark at Cannes with his second film, Canal, released in 1957, which won the Jury Prize that year. With films such as The Birch Wood in 1970, The Wedding in 1973, The Promised Land in 1974, and The Maids of Wilko in 1979, Wajda established himself as an adapter of Polish literary masterpieces. Beyond his adaptations of Polish masterpieces, Wajda is one of the most important filmmakers in Polish cinema. Rejecting the codes of Soviet propaganda and socialist realism, he did not hesitate to criticize communist ideas and their excesses through a baroque and electric style of filmmaking that emphasized self-sacrifice, self-giving, and great progressive or humanist causes. His repeated statements against martial law in Poland and his harsh criticism of the policies of the government in power prompted him to film abroad to avoid censorship in his own country. In France, he shot one of his greatest historical films, Danton, in 1983, which served as a metaphorical canvas for his criticism of Poland under martial law at the time. The film won the César Award for Best Director in 1983 and multiple awards at several festivals. He also directed Les Possédés in 1988, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's book, which allowed him to work with Isabelle Huppert and Lambert Wilson. With his 2007 film Katyń, he revisited this great massacre in Polish history, breaking the silence on the subject to question the legacy of communism in Poland. His last film, The blue flowers in 2016, is a biography of Władysław Strzemiński, an avant-garde painter who fought against Stalinist power. He died on October 9, 2016, in Warsaw at the age of 90.
