Alexander Ford

Although born in kyiv, Ukraine, on November 24, 1900, Aleksander Ford is a Polish filmmaker, who held a prominent position in his country until he fell out of favor and was forced into exile.

Of Jewish origin, Ford studied Art History at the University of Warsaw. At that time his interest in cinema awoke, and he made several shorts. In the 1930s he was one of the founders of START, Stowarzyszenie Milosnikow Filmu Artystycznego, that is, Association of Artistic Film Fans, which advocates for a socially committed cinema. “Cinema should not be a cabaret, it has to be a school,” he commented. And indeed, Ford’s first feature films, La legión de la calle (1932) and Despertar(1934), point in this direction. Also, faithful to his Semitic roots, he signed two documentaries, Halutzim (1935) -about the Jewish pioneers, in which he works with his wife Olga- and La vida de los niños (1936) -which follows the lives of the Jewish children in Poland.

The outbreak of the war will place him in an enviable situation within the Polish film “establishment”. Indeed, from the Soviet Union, and a member of the Polish Unit of the Red Army, he will be in charge of directing the war service of Polish cinema, and will deliver various war reports. After the war was over, with the communist party card, his position was consolidated, becoming the visible head of Film Polski, the state company that dictates what is produced, distributed and exhibited in Poland, after the nationalization of theaters. Roman Polasnki recognized Ford’s professional worth, but he did not fail to point out that he had established himself as the owner of a “small empire of his own.”

Contradictions of totalitarian countries, Ford occupied the key position in Polish cinema, until it began to be uncomfortable for the regime, which took away the “toy” of Film Polski in 1947, for not being rigorous enough with films contrary to the Marxist ideal. ; Despite his communist affiliation, other party members such as Stanislav Albrecht would make his life impossible, having to go to other Eastern countries to escape his control. His best-regarded films are The Street Across the Street (1949), about the Warsaw uprising during the war, Young Chopin (1952), a biopic dedicated to the Polish composer who followed the canons of socialist realism, and The Five from Barska Street.(1954), which deals with juvenile delinquency unleashed by the war, and which won an award at Cannes. Despite everything, his best-known film is surely The Teutonic Knights (1960), based on the novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz , which narrates the historical events that led to the battle of Grunwald between the Poles and the Germans. But before The Eighth Day of the Week (1958) was banned in Poland, and Ford would end up leaving his country, expelled from the communist party and victim of Wladyslaw Gomulka’s anti-Semitism, first to Israel, then to Denmark, and finally to the United States, where he would end up taking his own life, in 1980. His cinema would decline, and the adaptation of a work by Alelsandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle(1973), was not well received. Neither was the film that closes his filmography, The Martyr (1975), which addresses the figure of the Jewish educator Korczak in the war years, curiously also addressed in a film by Andrzej Wajda fifteen years later.