Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (originally: Człowiek z Marmuru) is now considered one of the foremost films from behind the Iron Curtain. The film, released at a time when the country’s media was carefully screened by censors, criticises the system from within.
Agnieszka, a film school student, wants to make a television film about an over-achieving worker in the 1950s, Mateusz Birkut, a bricklayer at Kraków’s Nowa Huta district who beat records when he led a five-man team to lay 30,000 bricks in eight hours.
Through talks with people who knew Birkut and archives of old newsreels found in vaults, Agnieszka discovers the truth about the hero of the time, and the truth about the time in which she lives and last but not least – about herself.
The film, shot in 1976, could not openly discuss the subject but the people watching during the time of protests at the Gdańsk shipyards knew – it was clear that Mateusz Birkut probably died on the coast during the riots in 1970, when the militia and the army were ordered to shoot workers protesting against the situation in their country.