Polish Cinema’s Shadow History: Films That Were Never Made

wajda andrzej portrety 2_6906851.jpg, default, Andrzej Wajda on the set of the film 'Man of Iron', 1981, Gdańsk Shipyard, photo: Maciej Billewicz / Forum

#film

What would a Polish James Bond film directed by Stanisław Bareja have been like, and why did Andrzej Wajda dream of making a film adaptation of Stefan Żeromski’s novel ‘The Coming Spring’ for nearly 50 years? What kind of curse looms over Leopold Tyrmand’s novel ‘The Man with the White Eyes’, and why have we never seen a film about Katarzyna Kobro?

Filmmakers’ shelves and drawers are like vast graveyards, filled with abandoned ideas and unfinished projects. Some of those scripts might have flopped, but others might have become part of our cinematic heritage. So what alternate film histories are hidden there? Let’s delve into the film archives to uncover some of the most compelling Polish films that were never made.

Wojciech Has’s masterpiece

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Wojciech Jerzy Has, photo: Wojciech Plewiński / Forum

Picture image

wojciech_jerzy_hasforum_.jpg

Wojciech Jerzy Has’s Osioł Grający na Lirze (A Donkey Playing the Lyre) is one of the stand-outs in this collection. It’s as legendary for Polish cinema as Kubrick’s Napoleon, Welles’s Don Quixote and Visconti’s In Search of Lost Time are for the rest of the world. It was meant to be Has’ magnum opus – the culmination of his career and his final artistic statement. In an interview with Piotr Jaworski in 1996, Has said:

Text

If I take on a new project after so many years, it must be something very personal. This is a film that should have been made 10 years ago. The texts were compiled by Jadwiga Kukułczanka; my contribution to the project was the adaptation of the texts. […] It’s a very expensive film, unfortunately, and if it’s made, it will be exactly as written in the screenplay, without any changes. I don’t know if we’ll ever manage to produce it...

There were many challenges, resulting not only from the distinctive painterly aesthetic that Has always had for his films but also from the text’s complex structure. Inspired by a sculpture in Chartres Cathedral and the story of Gilgamesh, Jadwiga Kukułczanka composed a dreamlike story in which famous people from various eras meet and converse: Socrates and Mayakovsky, Montaigne and Freud, Emperor Augustus and the Virgin Mary, and finally – Hitler and Machiavelli.

The film’s production turned into a long-running saga. By 1981, the director had finalised the details of a co-production agreement with French partners, and the Polish delegation planned to fly to Paris on 12 December. Unfortunately, the group missed their flight. Most likely they would have flown a day later, if not for… martial law, which was declared by the communist regime on 13 December.

Has returned to the project many times throughout his life – even in the post-communist years. He believed that Osioł Grający na Lirze would be his cinematic swan song, and that the film would star Catherine Deneuve and Orson Welles alongside Gustaw Holoubek. Unfortunately, the film never came to fruition, remaining one of Has’ unfulfilled dreams and a legend in film history.

Andrzej Wajda’s endless wait for spring

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Andrzej Wajda on the set of the film "Chronicle of Amorous Accidents", 1985, photo: Jerzy Kośnik / PAP

Picture image

wajda_a_kawaleria_kronika_wypadkow_milosnych_1985_01.jpg

Has wasn’t the only one to taste the bitterness that comes from witnessing the gradual demise of a lifelong dream. Andrzej Wajda had a similar experience when he became obsessed with adapting Stefan Żeromski’s novel The Coming Spring. He pondered the idea of bringing it to the silver screen throughout his entire artistic career, first writing about it in his notebooks as early as 1956, even before the production of Kanał.

The film adaptation of Żeromski’s novel matured and aged along with the director, who, over the course of several decades, wrote five different screenplays for it: in 1966, 1978, 1991, 1997 and 1999. He always envisaged his favourite actors in the cast: first Kazimierz Rudzki and Tadeusz Łomnicki, later Daniel Olbrychski and Beata Tyszkiewicz, and then, in the early 1980s, Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Krystyna Janda.

Why did The Coming Spring become such an obsession for Wajda? He commented on it in 1991:

Text

In this story, there’s a great deal of debate about something we’re experiencing now, in the present day – namely, the question of what kind of country Poland should be. I think the slogan ‘Poland needs a grand vision’ would be received by viewers nowadays as a fresh, recently conceived idea.

For Wajda, who wished to provoke discussion through his films about the identity of Poles as a nation and social group, Żeromski was the ideal partner. This was particularly true given that his portrayal of Poland never seemed to lose its relevance and, even years later, resonated with the country’s situation at a historic turning point.

And it was precisely the timely relevance of The Coming Spring that became one of the reasons why Wajda never made his film. In 1966, politics stood in the way of the film’s production – the censors detected political undertones in it (the corpses slashed by Cezary Baryka supposedly evoked associations with Red Army soldiers), and subsequent attempts to adapt Żeromski’s novel for the screen were thwarted by Wajda’s own artistic decisions. Two films ended up taking precedence for him over The Coming Spring: 1981’s Man of Iron, which was ‘commissioned’ by striking Solidarity members, and The Ring with a Crowned Eagle in 1991, which was based on a novel by Ścibor-Rylski and became Wajda’s unfulfilled dream of a new Ashes and Diamonds.

Ultimately, Wajda’s film adaptation of The Coming Spring faded into oblivion when another director, Filip Bajon, made his own version. When Wajda read about the film in Gazeta Wyborcza in 2000, he noted in the margin with a felt-tip pen: ‘The end of my film The Coming Spring’. Then he placed all the materials he’d prepared over the years into a wooden chest at the Manggha Centre and personally sealed it by hammering dozens of nails into the lid.

The James Bond of communist Poland

Video embed

As ostrzega - PRZESTRZEGAJ PRZEPISÓW BHP! (Hydrozagadka)

The history of Polish cinema during the communist era is full of intriguing projects which, for various reasons, never made it to the silver screen. In his outstanding book Historia Niebyła Kina PRL (The History of Non-Existent Cinema in Communist Poland), Tadeusz Lubelski traces the fates of 13 such films, describing the fascinating stories of their conception and eventual demise. What they have in common are illustrious names as well as, quite often, lofty artistic, political and intellectual ambitions.

Nasz Człowiek w Warszawie (Our Man in Warsaw) stands out from the rest. It is, after all, an unpretentious film that – had it been made – would undoubtedly now be counted among the most outstanding comedies in the history of Polish cinema. It couldn’t have turned out otherwise, for it was going to be a collaboration between two outstanding directors: Stanisław Bareja and Jacek Fedorowicz. The former was one of the most talented Polish film directors of his time and a rising star of comedy, while the latter was an actor and an intellectual comedian. They started working together in 1966, crafting a story about an atomic bomb that ends up in the Zegrze Reservoir near Warsaw, and some American spies straight out of a James Bond film who come to communist Poland. Among them is the hapless Professor (Fedorowicz), and his guide to socialist reality was going to be a bumbler in Warsaw played by Bohdan Łazuka.

Bareja and Fedorowicz drew heavily on early James Bond films to create a cinematic pastiche. But Bond was not the only inspiration for the film: the title itself was a reference to Carol Reed’s classic Our Man in Havana and Graham Greene’s novel on which it was based, while the plot of the spy-themed comedy was reportedly inspired by Luigi Comencini’s Don Camillo in Moscow.

In 1967, the two brilliant comedians finished writing their screenplay, which they planned to shoot at the Rytm film studio. However, production never took place. This was because a politically motivated restructuring of the Polish film industry was happening at about the same time, during which the Script Evaluation Committee was shut down. From then on, politicians gained greater influence over which films were made and which were shelved. Without any solid support from the industry, Nasz Człowiek w Warszawie ended up in the latter group of projects, and when, several years later, Andrzej Kondratiuk made his brilliant film Hydrozagadka, there was no longer any need for Bareja and Fedorowicz’s film.

During this period, many more intriguing projects were condemned to oblivion in the film archives – today, they would be a treat for lovers of Polish cinema. A real gem would surely have been the film adaptation of Witkacy’s 622 Upadku Bunga (622 Downfalls of Bungo) by Jan Lenica in collaboration with Tadeusz Konwicki, as well as the story of King Stanisław August as told by the exceptionally talented Wojciech Wiszniewski, who died tragically young.

However, important but never-realised projects are by no means exclusively a thing of the past. Contemporary cinema also features many stories of major film projects that, for various reasons, have fallen by the wayside at various stages of production.

The bad guy who never came to Warsaw

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Xawery Żuławski, photo: Bartosz Bobkowski / Agencja Gazeta

Picture image

xawery_zulawski_agencja_gazeta_bb130606_206-2.jpg

The most notable of these is the film adaptation of Leopold Tyrmand’s The Man with White Eyes [originally titled Zły in Polish, which more literally means ‘the bad guy’ or ‘angry’ – ed.], which Xawery Żuławski began working on many years ago. Following the success of The Polish-Russian War, Żuławski set to work on a film version of one of Poland’s most famous novels. It was 2011, and Żuławski, together with producers from Water Color Studio, was working on the screenplay and preparations for the film’s production. The premiere was scheduled for 2014, and a year earlier the Polish Film Institute had awarded the film a grant of 3.5 million złoty. Actors had been cast and a crew assembled, ready to start filming. Suddenly, dark clouds began to loom over the project. Or more precisely – Leopold Tyrmand’s heir, Matthew Tyrmand.

In an interview with Sebastian Łupak for Wirtualna Polska, Żuławski recalled that dramatic moment:

Text

I was dismissed from the project after four years of work, having written the screenplay, secured funding for it, cast the actors and prepared the entire storyboard, which consisted of 1,500 drawings. Suddenly, Tyrmand’s heir appeared; he didn’t like me and told me to leave. That cost me another four years, because it’s not so easy to jump into a new film project right away. Tyrmand’s ‘Zły’ consumed four years of my life: you’re working hard and suddenly you’re thrown from the horse at full gallop…

In 2015, it became clear that Żuławski’s film adaptation of Zły would never be made. Would someone else direct it? There were doubts about that, as well. After parting ways with Żuławski, the producers invited Łukasz Palkowski to join the project, but he already had other professional commitments.

For years, the name of Mariusz Palej has also been associated with a plan to make a film version. It has remained a challenge, however, to raise enough funding to get this historical epic off the ground, with a grant awarded by the Polish Film Institute (PISF) proving to be far from sufficient, leaving the entire project up in the air.

Katarzyna Kobro: a non-existent biography

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Katarzyna Kobro, c. 1930–1931, photo courtesy of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź

Picture image

kobro katarzyna portret_6028140.jpg

Żuławski is not the only rising star of the film industry forced to give up a promising project. Iwona Siekierzyńska also experienced the bitter disappointment of parting with a project she loved.

In 2013, Iwona Siekierzyńska and Wojciech Pawlik won the top prize in Script Pro, Poland’s most prestigious screenwriting competition. The jury honoured them for their script Kobro – a story about Katarzyna Kobro, a great artist whose legacy had for decades been overshadowed by that of her equally great husband, Władysław Strzemiński.

The story kept returning to Siekierzyńska. She wasn’t immediately keen on the idea. However, when Wojciech Pawlik suggested they write the screenplay together, she became more interested in the story. Together, they produced dozens of versions of it after devoting a great deal of time to research, which enabled them to uncover the truth about the artist’s everyday life.

In an interview with Kalina Cybulska from the Polish Film Institute, Pawlik said:

Text

Kobro is gradually becoming an icon of feminism, but we don’t portray her as feminists sometimes do – as a suffering woman who sacrificed herself for her child and was abused by her husband. There have already been plenty of stories like that. We want to portray her as a proud, fiery, spirited, energetic woman, holding her head high. We believe that through our screenplay, Kobro will become a more complete character, and her relationship with Strzemiński won’t be reduced to just one aspect of their complicated relationship.

The prize in the Script Pro competition was expected to open the door for Siekierzyńska to make this film. The Educational Film Studio was going to produce it, with two actresses playing the role of Kobro – Karolina Gruszka and Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik – and Łukasz Simlat in the role of Kobro’s partner. Unfortunately, the film was never made.

Around the same time, the subject was taken up by Andrzej Wajda, whose Afterimage – a story about the genius and resilience of Władysław Strzemiński – was released in 2016. There was simply no room left on the Polish market for Siekierzyńska’s film. This is a shame, for a feminist story about Katarzyna Kobro seems more relevant today than Wajda’s hastily cobbled-together film. Wajda, who had also been forced to abandon important projects in the past, had this time himself contributed to the demise of a film by a younger director, one excellently prepared to make a film exploring Katarzyna Kobro’s life after having directed a play about her at the Nowy Theatre in Łódź.

These few titles are only a fragment of a much longer list of films that never made it past the page. Somewhere in archives and private drawers lie other scripts, storyboards and contracts that promised new classics, star performances or fresh ways of looking at Polish history – and that today survive only as rumours and footnotes. Some were stopped by politics or ideology, others by budgets, changing market trends or the whims of heirs and institutions. Together, they form a shadow history of Polish cinema: a parallel canon made up of films we can imagine but will never actually see.

Originally written in Polish, Feb 2026, translated by Scotia Gilroy, March 2026

Language English