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, with Krystyna Janda reprising her role and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz playing the son of the labourer from the previous film, an activist who has married the filmmaker.
The film was “commissioned” by a striking shipworker in August, 1980, who suggested to Wajda, “Why don’t you make a film about us? Call it: Man of Iron.” By November he had a screenplay, a story about a TV journalist ordered to dig up dirt to discredit the union leaders, a conceit that allowed Wajda to incorporate documentary and archival footage from the stand-offs with the government in 1970 and 80. Shooting was completed in April 1981 and in May the film premiered at Cannes, where it would win the top prize, the Palme d’Or. Shortly afterwards, martial law was declared in Poland.
Looking back, Wajda mused: “Was the film good or bad? What does it matter? There was no film like it.”
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.
Shot at the very epicentre of Solidarity’s activities and featuring an appearance by Lech Wałęsa, this brave, imaginative film became part of the political process it observed. After winning the Palme d’Or, Man of Iron was banned at home and Wajda went into exile.
Phillip French, The Observer
An urgent, nervy narrative conveys all the exhilaration and bewilderment of finding oneself on the very crestline of crucial historical change; and for the viewer, all the retrospective melancholy of knowing that euphoria shattered by subsequent events.
Sheila Johnston, Time Out
Forged in a white heat, its structure molded by history, Man of Iron brings Wajda’s open-ended masterpiece, Man of Marble, to stunning, dialectical completion. Together, the films form a remarkable political epic, at once prophecy, intervention, and documentation.
J Hoberman, Village Voice
Andrzej Wajda
Jerzy Radziwiłowicz, Krystyna Janda, Marian Opania
Poland
1981
In Polish with English subtitles
Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival
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Credits
Screenwriter
Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski
Cinematography
Edward Kłosiński
Editor
Halina Prugar
Original Music
Andrzej Korzyński
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.