Andrzej Wajda

The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.

A young academy soldier, Maciek Chelmicki, is ordered to shoot the secretary of the KW PPR. A coincidence causes him to kill someone else. Meeting face to face with his victim, he gets a shock. He faces the necessity of repeating the assassination. He meets Krystyna, a girl working as a barmaid in the restaurant of the "Monopol" hotel. His affection for her makes him even more aware of the senselessness of killing at the end of the war. Loyalty to the oath he took, and thus the obligation to obey the order, tips the scales.

Danton and Robespierre were close friends and fought together in the French Revolution, but by 1793 Robespierre was France's ruler, determined to wipe out opposition with a series of mass executions that became known as the Reign of Terror. Danton, well known as a spokesman of the people, had been living in relative solitude in the French countryside, but he returned to Paris to challenge Robespierre's violent rule and call for the people to demand their rights. Robespierre, however, could not accept such a challenge, even from a friend and colleague, and he blocked out a plan for the capture and execution of Danton and his allies.

On September 1st, 1939, Nazi Germany invades Poland, unleashing World War II. On September 17th, the Soviet Red Army crosses the border. The Polish army, unable to fight on two fronts, is defeated. Thousands of Polish men, both military and government officials, are captured by the invaders. Their fate will only be known several years later.

In 1945, as Stalin sets his hands over Poland, famous painter Wladislaw Strzeminski refuses to compromise on his art with the doctrines of social realism. Persecuted, expelled from his chair at the University, he's eventually erased from the museums' walls. With the help of some of his students, he starts fighting against the Party and becomes the symbol of an artistic resistance against intellectual tyranny.

In Warsaw in 1980, the Communist Party sends disgruntled radio reporter Winkel to Gdańsk to dig up dirt on the shipyard strikers - particularly on Maciek Tomczyk, an independent labour union leader whose father was killed in the December 1970 protests. Posing as sympathetic, Winkel interviews the people surrounding Tomczyk, including his detained wife, Agnieszka.

Love at Twenty unites five directors from five different countries to present their different perspectives on what love really is at the age of 20. The episodes are united with the score of Georges Delerue and still photos of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

In the last few days of the Warsaw Uprising during World War II, a modest group of Resistance members remains. The band must take refuge in the sewers under the orders of leader Zadra, but it's only a matter of time before they will have to emerge. However, when they try, they are met only with intense hostility from the Nazis. Despite their attempts stay resolute through immense mental strain, it becomes increasingly apparent that they may be doomed.

How was it possible that a single man influenced contemporary world so significantly? This film is an attempt to capture the phenomenon of a common man’s metamorphosis into a charismatic leader — an attempt to see how a Gdansk shipyard electrician fighting for workers’ rights awakened a hidden desire for freedom in millions of people.

Russia, 1870. A group of young anarchist revolutionaries set out to overthrow the Czarist regime through violence. Their attacks create a climate of psychosis and mutual distrust among the population, but in reality, both revolutionaries and repressors are being manipulated by a diabolical individual.

Set during the Nazi occupation of Poland, the story follows Michał, who witnesses the murder of his mother, wife and child and then is hurled into a life that literally is not his own; a surreal world littered with trapdoors, doppelgängers and wormholes.

A winter day at a Polish castle, half owned by a fatalistic notary and half by a volcanic old soldier's niece. The old soldier, Cupbearer, and the notary are sworn enemies, which may doom the love between the niece, Klara, and the notary's son, Waclaw. On this day, the tongue-tied Cupbearer asks a braggart courtier, Papkin, to sue on his behalf for the hand of the widow Hanna. Papkin succeeds and

A young doctor is tired of being sought by women. One night he meets a young girl who all but forces herself into his room where they talk of morals and love.

Three-part film centered around a film being made by a group of young directors. In the first a working-class girl finishes school and has her first love affair, which ends badly. In the second a provincial boy with dreams of life in the theater has an affair with his boss' wife. They meet during the film's screen tests.

This impressionistic portrait of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics pays as much attention to the crowds and workers as it does to the actual competitive events. Highlights include an epic pole-vaulting match between West Germany and America, and the final marathon race through Tokyo's streets. Two athletes are highlighted: Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila, who receives his second gold medal, and runner Ahamed Isa from Chad, representing a country younger than he is.

Stach is a wayward teen living in squalor on the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Guided by an avuncular Communist organizer, he is introduced to the underground resistance—and to the beautiful Dorota. Soon he is engaged in dangerous efforts to fight oppression and indignity, maturing as he assumes responsibility for others’ lives.

In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers' arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.

Andrzej Wajda's first movie looks at the pottery in the town of Iłża, Poland. Much of it shows the actual process of creating all the objects out of clay.

Andrzej Wajda's Japanese-language film based on the last chapter of Dostoevsky's Idiot, in which Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin return to the past in a conversation over the dead body of Nastassya Filippovna. Bando Tamasaburo, regarded as one of the most outstanding female impersonators in Japanese theater, plays the dual role of Myshkin and Nastassya.

In Stalinist Poland, cabaret singer Tonia decides to spend the evening drinking with a group of friends. The next morning, she awakes to find that, for reasons unknown to her, she has been jailed as a political prisoner. As prison officials interrogate, torture and humiliate her, she fights for survival and to maintain her innocence by refusing to sign a false confession. As her years of imprisonment pass, her relationship with her captors grows more complicated.

A young Polish filmmaker sets out to find out what happened to Mateusz Birkut, a bricklayer who became a propaganda hero in the 1950s but later fell out of favor and disappeared.

In 1988, Figaro magazine asked a few famous directors to direct a series of short movies to celebrate the 10 years of the revue. The movies have been released for the French revolution bicentenary. Includes: Werner Herzog's Les Gaulois, David Lynch's The Cowboy and the Frenchman, Andrzej Wajda's Proust contre la déchéance, Luigi Comencini's Pèlerinage à Agen, Jean-Luc Godard's Le dernier mot.

Romance brings two warring families together in this historical drama. As citizens fight for independence in 1810s Lithuania, Tadeusz, the son of a murderer, and Zosia, a young woman, come together for a wedding against a backdrop of changing politics, ancient traditions, and the uncertain future of a country.

In 1212, a Children's Crusade is launched after a young shepherd, Jacques de Cloyes, claims to have had a vision in which it is said that the innocence of children would be able to liberate Jerusalem. A monk, returning from Holy Land, joins the crusade and hears the children's confessions, gradually realizing that most of them are taking part not for religious, but for more worldly reasons, like rejected love and hopes for freedom, the true nature of their enthusiasm is homosexual. In fact, if the children follow Jacques, it is more for romantic than religious reasons. They take literally the famous phrase: “Love one another”.

Series of single made-for-television dramas.

Horror legend Christopher Lee hosts this anthology in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, each half-hour episode adapting a story from a classic author, with tales by Edgar Allen Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde.

Created to mark the 60th anniversary of Poland's regained independence, Andrzej Wajda's acclaimed seven-hour stage production As the Years Go By, As the Days go By... follows two Kraków families between 1874 and 1914.

“Broken Silence” is composed of five hourlong shorts from a quintet of international directors: Hungary’s Janos Szasz (“Eyes of the Holocaust”), Argentina’s Luis Puenzo (“Some Who Lived”), Russia’s Pavel Chukhraj (“Children From the Abyss”), the Czech Republic’s Vojtech Jasny (“Hell on Earth”) and Poland’s Andrzej Wajda (“I Remember”). The helmers, some descendants of Holocaust survivors, focus on the atrocities within their particular parts of the world, with testimonials, pictures and an overall tone as they pertain to each region’s culture and history.