On their way to an afternoon on the lake, husband and wife Andrzej and Krystyna nearly run over a young hitchhiker. Inviting the young man onto the boat with them, Andrzej begins to subtly torment him; the hitchhiker responds by making overtures toward Krystyna. When the hitchhiker is accidentally...
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...
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.
Russia, 1870. A group of young anarchist revolutionaries set out to overthrow the Czarist regime through violence. Their attacks create a climate of psychosis and mutual distrust among the population, but in reality, both revolutionaries and repressors are being manipulated by a diabolical...
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.
Set during the Nazi occupation of Poland, in which Michał witnesses the murder of his mother, wife and child. He is hurled into a life that literally is not his own; a surreal world littered with trapdoors, doppelgängers and wormholes. It also tells the true untold story of a vaccine laboratory...
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'...
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...
Włodek is a middle-aged man stuck in a dead-end job at the local library who lives with his harridan wife and critical in-laws in a small apartment. When Włodek draws the interest of a library patron, the beautiful young woman encourages him to strive for better things in his life and...
A violinist in a provincial Polish orchestra, whose husband is the director of the ensemble, on a visit to the US ties up with the world- renowned symphony conductor. As it turns out he was once in love with violinist's mother. The conductor, a slightly unstable hypochondriac, returns to Poland to...
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...
Laguna was once a great soccer player whose career was interrupted by an injury. He spent years climbing the ranks to become an international referee. He sees the prevailing arrangements, manipulations, and bribery around him. Now desperate, he decides to stage an extraordinary culmination of his...
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,...
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.
Based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem (Solaris). The main character, race car driver Ryszard Fox, is involved in many car accidents. After each car crash he gets a transplant for one or another internal organ. After a while there is a question: Who really is Ryszard Fox?
Set at the turn of the century, the story concerns a Polish poet living in Cracow who has decided to marry a peasant girl. The wedding is attended by a heterogenous group of people from all strata of Polish society, who dance, get drunk and lament Poland's 100-year-long division under Russia,...
Jerzy Szajnowicz-Ivanov, the son of a Polish mother and a Russian father, raised in Greece, reports to the Carpathian Brigade in the spring of 1941. While the Poles are wary of him at first, he proves his worth by taking part in several sabotage actions against the Nazis.
Wajda's homage to Zbigniew Cybulski, the "Polish James Dean" who starred in the director's ASHES AND DIAMONDS and died young. The movie follows the tribulations of a director attempting to make a movie with a Cybulski-like star who never shows up.
"Waiting for Godot" on ice and snow, without words. Against a barren winter landscape, a figure approaches: it's a man, pulling a small sleigh on which another man sits, plucking a dead bird. They stop to trade places; the one now on the sleigh takes out his knitting. Accidents, misunderstandings,...
