Andrzej Wajda

Andrzej Wajda was born on March 6, 1926 in Suwalki, Poland. Although of peasant origins, his mother Aniela was a teacher, his father Jakub an army officer. Andrzej believed that he had inherited from his parents the desire not to be in a place by chance, but to force himself to follow a path, “to reach places that he wanted to reach.” Jakub’s assassination during World War II, in the Katyn massacre, would deeply mark the future filmmaker, who was thirteen years old at the time. Wajda would address the war tragedy on several occasions, until dealing with the specific historical events where his father lost his life in Katyn (2007), a film that became a true national event in Poland, due to the previous stubborn manipulation by the Russians of what happened.

During the war he survived by practicing various trades, from blacksmith to restorer of frescoes in churches. He also collaborated with the resistance in the Armia Krajowa, supported by the London government-in-exile, and which clashed with the Armia Ludowa, the communist-led, Soviet-backed people’s army. The theme of the imprint of the war on the members of his generation, so dear to the Polish Film School, will have a most illustrious representative in Wajda, which will complete an emblematic trilogy, made up of Generation (1955), Kanal (1957) and ashes and diamonds(1958), where he subtly opposes the canons of socialist realism, to denounce Russian passivity in the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis, while stressing the role played by the Armia Krajowa in the war.

But let’s not anticipate events. At the end of the war, Wajda’s interests clearly opted for the artistic field, and he entered the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts. With the painter Andrej Wroblewski he will found the Group of the Self-taught, a painting influenced by neorealism. He will also be one of the first students at the Lodz Film School, where he graduated in 1952. Soon he will be an assistant to Aleksander Ford , a filmmaker sympathetic to the regime, and between 1950 and 1955 he makes his first shorts and documentaries, which lead him to Generation , a warlike feature in whose cast you can see Roman Polanski himself . Although if we are talking about an actor who will have an important relationship with Wajda, it is obligatory to mention the ill-fatedZbigniew Cybulski -he died at the age of 40-, with whom he worked three times, and who was the perfect image of the young Pole disconcerted by historical and social upheavals: “He summed up our generation and he looked like a brother to me,” said the director, who made him an absent character in Todo a la venta (1969).

His artistic interests led Wajda to the theater, and in fact he has been director of the most important stages in his country, the Stary Theater in Krakow and the Powszechny Theater in Warsaw. And always restless and interested in different aesthetic currents, he would promote the Manggha Japanese Art and Technology Center in Krakow.

Wajda is a director who does not evade the political issue, even in the hostile environment of a totalitarian regime. Issues theoretically from the past, such as the recent war, offer a reading in light of the contemporary context in which he shoots his stories. This is also true of the adaptations of great literary classics from his country such as The Wedding (1973), based on the play by Stanislaw Wyspianski , and Pan Tadeusz (1999), based on Adam Mickiewicz ‘s patriotic poem . And by contemporary authors, whose texts are also used by other directors, such as Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz , from which The Birch Forest (1970) and the magnificentWilko’s Ladies (1979). His transit through period films that could be said to be apolitical allow him to rest from the authorities’ uneasiness in the face of such essential titles as The Marble Man (1977), which openly questions communism, the Stakhanovist-type incentives that crush the individual, and for Of course Stalin. Surely the making of a social film that criticizes capitalist exploitation during the industrial revolution, The Land of the Great Promise(1975), and which was awarded at the Moscow Festival, made it possible to make another film, which he had longed to do for more than a decade. The director will be involved in the first person in the political vicissitudes of Poland when he became a councilor for the Solidarity union, which pushed him to shoot The Iron Man (1981), a kind of sequel to The Marble Man where the events of the Gdansk shipyards, and which was awarded the Palme d’Or in Cannes. In the period of free Poland, after the fall of the wall, Wajda would be a senator of the Republic between 1989 and 1991. And he would return to the theme of Solidarity in the cinema with his exciting  Walesa, the hope of a people (2013), articulated around an interview with Oriana Fallacci.

Wajda is the perfect example of a total artist, with a broad intellectual background, with an educated aesthetic sense, who tries to say something with his films. This is the case of Danton (1983), one of the best films about the French Revolution, and which allows contemporary readings in light of the martial law that was imposed in Poland at that time. Or Korczak ‘s (1990), a true story about a Jewish teacher who takes care of orphaned children in the Warsaw Ghetto, and no doubt inspired Steven Spielberg ‘s Schindler’s List . Spielberg was precisely one of the great supporters of him for the honorary Oscar received in 2000, after achieving three nominations-he would achieve a fourth in 2008 with Katyn– in the category of best non-English language film. In a letter addressed to the management team of the Hollywood Academy, Spielberg stated: “Andrzej Wajda’s example reminds all filmmakers that, from time to time, history can claim profound and unexpected demands on our courage; that our public can ask us for spiritual encouragement; that we may be required to risk our careers for the civilian life of our people.”