Katyn

Wajda's first three films all derived from his experience in the Polish underground during WWII. Set in 1945, Ashes and Diamonds is his first masterpiece, and one of the essential films about wartime.

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.

Warsaw, 1944. Resistance fighters wage a desperate battle against the German occupying forces, finding refuge of sorts in the city’s sewer system. Wajda's second feature shared a Jury Prize at Cannes with Bergman's Seventh Seal.

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.

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...

This self-reflexive work serves as both a tribute to Ashes and Diamonds star Zbigniew Cybulski (who died in an accident at 39) and a meta-cinematic exploration of grief, memory, and the filmmaking process itself.

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.