Wajda’s first three films all derived from his experience in the Polish underground during WWII. The third of this loose trilogy, Ashes and Diamonds, is his first masterpiece, acknowledged not only as one the greatest Polish films ever made, but also as one of the essential films about wartime.
We are in 1945. The Nazis have been beaten back and a new Communist regime is taking shape. A trio of resistance fighters are ordered to assassinate an incoming district politician. But they botch their first attempt and when instructed to try again Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski, “the Polish James Dean”) is beset with doubts…
Screening here in a new 4K Restoration to mark Wajda’s centenary, Ashes and Diamonds is a vivid introduction to Wajda’s bold and romantic cinematic style.
Screenings of Andrzej Wajda’s films in North America in 2026 are part of the ‘Wajda 100 Tour – North America’ project, organized by DI Factory with the financial support of the Polish Film Institute. Special thanks to Jessica Rosner.
Nov 19: Series opening night talk by Bożena Karwowska, Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies at UBC
Ashes and Diamonds shocked me. It had to do with the look, both immediate and haunted, like a nightmare that won’t stop unfolding; the sense of maddening insanity and absurdity, the tragedy of political infighting on the brink of peace and coming of age during wartime; and the beauty of the lead actor, Zbigniew Cybulski.
Martin Scorsese
Everywhere in this film is sadness and a kind of delirium: the film was made just 13 years after the events it described; the original novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski on which it is based just three years. It is a testament to Poland’s crisis of identity and ideology.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
A great meditation on the nature of resistance – as well as its limits – Ashes and Diamonds is a string of classic scenes and moments, most of which became steady points of reference in Polish culture at large.
Michał Oleszczyk, rogerebert.com
Andrzej Wajda
Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyżewska, Wacław Zastrzeżyński, Adam Pawlikowski
Poland
1958
In Polish with English subtitles
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Credits
Screenwriter
Jerzy Andrzejewski, Andrzej Wajda
Cinematography
Jerzy Wójcik
Editor
Halina Nawrocka
Original Music
Filip Nowak
Andrzej Wajda 100
Toted as the father of Polish cinema, discover the works of Andrzej Wajda — arthouse classics done up in sparkling 4K restorations in honour of Wajda’s centennial year celebration.
A Generation
Wajda's first film is set in Warsaw, 1942 and concerns a young man much like himself, living in squalor and doing his best to disrupt the German Occupation, eventually falling in with a Communist-leaning Resistance cell.
Innocent Sorcerers
The closest Wajda got to a new wave film (and in fact it was shot before Godard's Breathless) this is an edgy romance about a womanizing jazz musician who hooks up with a liberated young woman over the course of an evening. Scripted by Jerzy Skolimowski.
The Ashes
Wajda's massive historical epic chronicles Poland's tragic involvement in the Napoleonic Wars, 1797-1812. The Poles fight alongside Napoleon in the hope of gaining independence, but it's a deal with the devil...
Landscape After The Battle
Based on the autobiographical short story collection This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Wajda's film shows a concentration camp survivor, Tadeusz in a displaced persons camp in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
The Birch Wood
A different side of Wajda: this is a romantic, sensual, bittersweet work. Stanislaw (Olgierd Łukaszewicz) is an ebullient artist who comes to visit his forester brother, Boleslaw (Daniel Olbrychski), a gloomy widower.
The Wedding
This densely allegorical satire is based on a 1901 play by Stanislaw Wyspianski, which was in turn based on a real wedding between a member of the affluent intelligentsia and a farmgirl. The drunken village revelries spiral through the night....
Man of Marble
One of the towering achievements in Wajda's career, Man of Marble is a Polish, proletarian Citizen Kane, with a 70s student filmmaker unearthing the fate of a working class hero, a bricklayer celebrated in Stalinist propaganda films in the 1950s.
Rough Treatment (aka Without Anesthesia)
Scripted by Agnieszka Holland, Rough Treatment is a key film of "the cinema of moral anxiety" in Poland in the 1970s, a Kafkaesque account of the dissolution a TV correspondent's marriage, his career, and indeed, everything else by which he sets store.
Man of Iron
Forged in the furnace of the Gdansk shipyard strikes that propelled Poland's first union independent of the communist party, Solidarity, and its leader Lech Welesa, to the forefront of history, Man of Iron is an extraordinary follow up to Man of Marble.
The Maids of Wilko
This wistful tale finds jaded WWI veteran Wiktor (Daniel Olbrychski) returning to the summer estate he used to visit before the war, and to the Wilko farm, where five sisters remember him fondly. Academy Award Nominee: Best Foreign Language Film
Danton
A morally and politically complex drama set during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, Wajda's fiery film clearly reflected his experiences of what was going on in Poland at the time, for all that was made in exile.
Korczak
With an admirably unsentimental script by Agnieszka Holland, and black-and-white cinematography by Robby Müller (Paris, Texas), Wajda relates the true story of the renowned doctor and teacher who ran a Jewish orphanage in the midst of the Holocaust.
Katyn
Returning to the subject of WWII once more, Wajda made perhaps his most personal film, broaching the once taboo topic of the massacre of some 22,000 Polish prisoners of war by the Red Army in the Kaytn forest, 1940. Among the victims, Wajda's father.