Day School: Celebrating the Centenary of Andrzej Wajda (1926 – 2016)

Andrzej Wajda’s first short film was released in 1951 and his last feature film in 2016. He made nearly sixty films over a fifty year career. He was a major director during a turbulent period of Polish history making and is remembered for three specific reasons as well as his general filmmaking prowess.
In the 1950s, primarily with his trilogy of films about the Second World War and its aftermath in Poland, he was seen alongside Kurosawa Akira, Satyajit Ray and Ingmar Bergman as one of the creators of a new form of international humanist cinema.
Over the next thirty years he would then find a way to make films critiquing Polish social and political issues using carefully thought out strategies that somehow swerved past the censors.
Finally, in his later years following the fall of the Soviet Union, he produced sometimes highly personal films about important Polish stories on an epic scale that attracted large audiences.
We will look at a group of films across his career and our focus film will be his most personal story, (Poland 2007), about the M**der of thousands of Polish officers, including Wajda’s father, by the Soviets in 1940.

The massacre was first denied and then evidence suppressed for fifty years during Soviet domination of Poland, laying a further burden on Poles who knew but could not speak about their history.

Tea and coffee will be available, for a small donation, and you are welcome to bring your own lunch.
Tickets are available online and on the door but due to limited places, please let us know if you are planning to buy your ticket on the door.

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