Andrzej Wajda

One of the world’s most renowned filmmakers and winner of an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2000; film and theatre director, scriptwriter and set designer. Born on the 6th of March 1926 in Suwałki, Poland, Wajda passed away on 9th October 2016.

Sat, 03/06/1926 - 12:00 - Sun, 10/09/2016 - 12:00

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Andrzej Wajda

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Polish Film School

A student of Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts from 1946 to 1949, Andrzej Wajda graduated from the Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź in 1953 with a major in Directing. He made his debut two years later with the film A Generation. It is a story of youngsters in Nazi-occupied Poland who enter the Gwardia Ludowa, a communist armed organization in Poland organised by the Soviet Union-led Polish Workers Party. In response to the protagonist’s change of heart, the film historian Tadeusz Lubelski said, ‘By making A Generation, Wajda took the same path as his friend Andrzej Wróblewski five years earlier – he found a new form to speak in the name of the dead’. Andrzej Wróblewski, a painter (1927-1957), one of Poland’s most independent post-war artists is associated with his well-known series Executions, dating from the end of the 1940s, which depicts visually expressive scenes from Nazi-occupied Poland, brutally deformed human figures torn into pieces.

A Generation was soon followed by Canal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), the latter based on a novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski. With these two films he became one of the most important directors of the new generation in Europe. They initiated a new current called the ‘Polish Film School’, which tells the stories of folk heroes from both during and after the war and challenges the national tradition of martyrdom and romantic heroism in art.

The story of Canal starts in the Warsaw district of Mokotów in mid-1944, on the 56th day of the Warsaw Uprising. The Uprising will soon fall after 63 days of fighting. After a decimated resurgent detachment makes a failed attempt to break away from the German troops’ encirclement, Zadra, the commander, orders them to get through the waste-water piping to the city centre where the fight is still going on. The group moves through the dark, winding underground system which is half-filled with water and excrement, while the Germans guard the manholes to throw down grenades. The scene in which Stokrotka and the wounded Korab reach the manhole exiting into the Wisła River only to find it is barred is one of the most famous scenes of Polish cinema.

Ashes and Diamonds entered the canons of film history thanks to the famous Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski. His portrayal of a young home army resistance soldier, Maciek Chełmicki, is considered the most important role of his career. He created the cult figure of a rebellious member of the intelligentsia.

Innocent Sorcerers

Wajda’s first colour film, Lotna (1959) was an adaptation of the novel by Wojciech Żukrowski. The year 1960 saw Innocent Sorcerers, a story of young people of the jazz age, rebellious and alienated from greater society. For the period, it was considered a unique film, full of new wave frivolity and charm. It was being filmed at the same time as Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. The script to Innocent Sorcerers was written by the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski and the well-known film director Jerzy Skolimowski in a mere two weeks. Fascinated by jazz and boxing, Skolimowski managed to incorporate his passions into the film. What Godard and Wajda’s films have in common is the relations between the main characters, their fear of love; what distinguished them is the way the stories are told and the way they finish.

The next year brought Samson, a movie based on a novel by Kazimierz Brandys, which told the story of a Jew who had escaped from the ghetto. This was followed by two foreign productions beginning in 1962: Siberian Lady Macbeth (Yugoslavia) and Love at Twenty (France/Germany).

Ashes

Wajda’s next film, Ashes (1965), based on a novel by Stefan Żeromski, triggered the noisiest debate in Wajda’s ten-year filmmaking career. It was a picture filled with historiosophical reflection, re-defining once more the attitudes towards Polishness and tradition. Critic Andrzej Jarecki wrote about his experience watching the film:

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My first reaction was fear. I felt a shudder at the realisation that I too belonged to the nation whose behaviour was being shown up there on the screen. Would anyone else have had the same cruel courage to present one’s own nation in such a way? There is presumably no one else in the world who would be able to depict in such an exhibitionist manner how cruel and stupid yet faithful and loyal and brave we are, what beautiful deaths we can die and how immortal we are, like in the hymn which opens the movie: ‘Poland will not die as long as we live...’ A nation without brains and without politicians, thoughtlessly moving towards perdition and death, and equipped only with hearts and heavy fists for hitting.

Author

Andrzej Jarecki, 'Sztandar Młodych' , 25.10.1965

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In 1967, Wajda returned to Yugoslavia to make another film, The Gates to Paradise, after Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel of the children crusades. 1968 was marked by two pictures, Roly Poly, after a story by Stanisław Lem, and Everything for Sale.

Everything for Sale

Triggered by Zbigniew Cybulski’s tragic death in 1967 and inspired by Federico Fellini’s ‘film about a film’ Eight and a Half, Wajda filmed Everything for Sale in 1968. The plot in which reality mixes with fiction is based on the circumstances of the filming of the movie: the film’s main character doesn’t come to the film set. The director shows the search for the missing actor. Everything for Sale is a bitter reflection of the situation of Polish public life at that time. Reveals the traces of Wajda’s artistic inspirations, it’s a reassessment of his artistic output and that of other contemporary Polish filmmakers.

A satirical social drama Hunting Flies (1970) was followed that same year by an adaptation of Tadeusz Borowski’s story Landscape After the Battle which once again took up the topic of war and a return to poetry was pronounced with Birch Wood based on a story by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. Two years later, Wajda made his first movie in Germany, Pilate and Others (1972) based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.

The Wedding

Still film from Andrzej Wajda's Wesele, 1972, photo: Studio filmowe Zebra / Filmoteka Narodowa / www.fototeka.fn.org.pl — Still film from Andrzej Wajda’s Wesele, 1972, photo: Studio filmowe Zebra / Filmoteka Narodowa / www.fototeka.fn.org.pl

1973 saw the production of The Wedding after a play of the same name by Stanisław Wyspiański. In an interview with the film critic Wanda Wertenstein, Wajda said: ‘It was Andrzej Kijowski’s idea (scriptwriter for The Wedding) to replace the long never-ending monologues […] with images’. Krzysztof T. Toeplitz wrote in 1973 in the monthly literary magazine Miesięcznik Literacki:

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This film could have expanded the play, added colour to it, fulfilled the dreams of set designers by being made even more wonderfully colourful, yet Wajda went in the other direction, making the fabric of the drama palpable and material. The wedding room in Wajda’s film is cramped, stuffy and overcrowded, the hall is narrow, the yard is bleak and muddy, the Host’s unfinished canvases lie around discarded in the shed alongside farming equipment. And then this material reality suddenly breaks through the convention of the theatre: theatre cannot happen in such surroundings; life, that is, film can.

The Promised Land

Two years later Wajda made the Oscar-nominated The Promised Land. Based on the novel by Władysław Reymont, it is one of Wajda’s top cinematic achievements. The film is set in Łódź at the end of the 19th century as the Polish textile industry flourishes and expensive intrigues set three businessmen at odds. Tomasz Burek wrote in 1974 for the magazine Kino:

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Fascinated as Wajda may seem by the three young heroes’ unbounded vitality, energy and their enterprising, as well as by their lack of inhibitions and appetite for life and sex, he exposes the sheer emptiness of their lives, with its cover of dynamic infantilism and automatic drive to make big money with even more zeal than Reymont.

Wajda created a unique fresco, its protagonists being not only the three heroes but equally the town itself: 19th-century Łódź, filthy yet wonderful and poised for a great civilisational leap. The movie starred Daniel Olbrychski, Wojciech Pszoniak and Andrzej Seweryn, actors who were among Wajda’s favourites and who appeared a number of times both in his earlier and later films.

In 1976 Wajda made The Shadow Line, a Polish-British co-production based on a story by Joseph Conrad.

Man of Marble

A year later Man of Marble came out; it was the story of Mateusz Birkut, an exemplary worker of the Stalinist period of Poland under communist rule, whose life is traced and recorded by a film school student named Agnieszka, who is writing about him for her dissertation. Through the story of the record holder of brick laying, the film is a window into the reality of the ‘50s in Poland and the political situation in the ‘70s.

The critic Waldemar Piątek wrote, ‘Man of Marble shows the tragedy of the people who believed in the sense of communist changes and ended up being destroyed by the system’. Incidentally, the film’s script, by Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski, had been written several years before, but censorship halted the making of the film until 1977. The story about disappointment with the system and enslaved minds brought Wajda the Critics Award at the Cannes Festival and spelled the artistic breakthrough for actors Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Krystyna Janda.

Man of Marble had its sequel in Man of Iron (1981), a movie showing vibrant contemporary Polish life, with the action taking place in the memorable August of 1980. The 1970s brought two more films by Wajda: Rough Treatment (1978), a reference to ‘cinema of moral anxiety’, and The Maids of Wilko (1979), another superb adaptation of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s prose and Wajda’s second Oscar-nominated movie. The year 1980 was marked by the production of The Conductor, starring John Gielgud, the distinguished English actor.

The ‘80s

Throughout the 1970s Wajda was mostly involved with foreign productions. It was in France that he made Danton (1983) after The Danton Case by Stanisława Przybyszewska, starring Gerard Depardieu and Wojciech Pszoniak, and The Possessed (1988) based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, with Isabelle Huppert, Omar Shariff and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz. Later Wajda went to Germany to direct Eine Love in Germany in 1983. His only film made in Poland during the 1980s was A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents based on a book by Tadeusz Konwicki. Jerzy Niecikowski commented in the magazine Film in 1987:

Despite an outward similarity, it takes us quite far from Wajda films based on books by Iwaszkiewicz. Unlike 'Birch Wood', this movie does not deal with death and its questioning of human existence, nor does it talk about time destroying feelings and dreams like is the case in 'The Maids of Wilko'. The true essence of the protagonists – the essence which entirely determines their fates – is history with a capital H. Here it is looked at from a singular perspective.

The ‘90s

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Wajda’s later films were unsuccessful attempts at sparking a dialogue with the audience. Indeed, the viewers and the critics both reacted rather dispassionately to his films throughout the 1990s, even though the director extended his reach to a number of themes. In 1990 he made Korczak, a biographical film, and in 1994 directed Nastassya, based on Dostoyevsky’s Idiot and starring the Japanese actors Tamasaburo Bando and Toshiyuki Nagashima. The years 1994 and 1995 marked Wajda’s return to the battleground topics, with Holy Week (based on Jerzy Andrzejewski’s book). The earlier The Crowned-Eagle Ring marked the end of the so-called Polish School of Film, according to cinema historian Jerzy Płażewski. Finally, in 1996 came Wajda’s screening of Tomek Tryzna’s popular modern novel, Miss Nothing.

Wajda managed to recapture a genuine rapport with his audience in 1999 following his production of Pan Tadeusz, based on the acclaimed novel by Adam Mickiewicz. This grand-scale project was taken up while Polish cinemas were overflowing with super-productions of national prose works on compulsory reading lists, and in retrospective Wajda’s Pan Tadeusz turned out to be the only masterpiece among them. Paradoxically, Wajda, who had more than once depicted the national tradition and its myths through a skewed looking glass, made a warm, gentle film, which perfectly conveyed the climate of Mickiewicz’s epic work. This beautiful picture, in which all the good and bad things alike are wrapped in a delicate mist of nostalgia, was what won audiences back.

In 2002 he brought out the film Revenge, based on Aleksander Fredro’s classic comedy. The plot revolves around aristocratic intrigues, marriages for money and a love story. Two enemies reside in two halves of the same castle.

Katyń

Many years of communist censorship restricted film-makers from dealing with sensitive topics, such as the wartime massacres in the Katyń Forest of eastern Russia in 1940. After 1989, Wajda started working on the script to the movie Katyń, but didn’t manage to finish it until 2007. Wajda’s Katyń was the first Polish movie on the heated topic. The film is the real-life story of the massacres which took place in April and May of 1940, when, on government orders, some 22,000 Polish citizens, of whom 10,000 were military officers, were murdered by the Soviet secret police – the NKVD, as part of a deliberate plan to wipe out the country’s intelligentsia. Until President Yeltsin admitted that is was the NKVD that committed the murders, Soviet propaganda had been putting the blame on the Germans. The events are of personal significance to Wajda, whose family suffered from the tragedy. In a 2009 interview with the film historian Tadeusz Lubelski for the magazine Kino, the director said,

It was a story about my mother. My mother was a victim of the Katyń mystification and my father was a victim of the Katyń war crime. The first movie on the topic had to show both of these aspects. [...]

Still from Andrzej Wajda's Katyń, photo by Fabryka Obrazu / East News — Still from Andrzej Wajda’s Katyń, photo by Fabryka Obrazu / East News

Wajda’s film is set after the war as an officer’s mother, wife and daughter await his return from the USSR’s prisoner-of-war camps. ‘The fate of the men is told through the longing, the suffering, desperation and loyalty of the women’, film critic Piotr Wojciechowski wrote in Kino magazine in 2007. ‘One of the director’s most important tasks was to harmonise the male and the female roles, the latter shows the history while the former embodies the myth’. Wojciechowski also pointed to the difficulties linked with unveiling a topic, which had been taboo for so many years:

The first film about Katyń had to be made with awareness about the limitations set on it which were bigger than for any other movie. It had to be nested in between myth and history. It therefore had to accept the limitations of history everywhere where that was possible, the reconstruction of facts had priority over the director’s free vision. [...] Thanks to its opulence, symbolism and an original style of transmitting a message, Katyń co-creates, accentuates and crowns what the director himself called ‘a panorama of Polish fate’.

The film’s Polish critics on the other hand commented on the price Wajda had to pay when attempting to accurately reconstruct the massacre and its mystification – oversimplified protagonists and relations between them. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and distributed in different European countries and in the United States, The Telegraph pointed to the film’s significance for the Poles and The Independent wrote about its role in the relationship between Russia and Poland. Commenting on the film as a means of transmission, Alastair McKay wrote for Uncut.co.uk:

Those who are unfamiliar with Polish history may find it slightly bewildering at first. The film cuts between events with little explanation, and Wajda makes only minimal efforts to sugar the pill [...] It’s not a feelgood movie. But is technically-brilliant filmmaking of a style that is rarely seen anymore – dense in allusion and symbol, light on character. Wajda’s great achievement is to bring history alive without cheapening it.

Much like Man Of Marble and Man Of Iron, which documented the rise of the Solidarity trade union, Katyń makes no apologies for its national bias.

Sweet Rush

The film opens with the following words:

The Tatar herb has two smells. If you gently rub the green, slightly cressed ribbon with your fingers, you can smell the delicate odour of the ‘water sitting in the shadow of the birches’ [editor’s translation] as Juliusz Słowacki wrote [...]. But when you crush that same herb, when you stick your nose in the cottony crease you can feel the odour of muddy silt, rotting fish scales, mud basically. When I was a child I associated this smell with the image of sudden death.

Wajda’s admiration for the prose of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz creates a counterbalance for his treatment of political and historical topics. Sweet Rush follows the director’s adaptations of Iwaszkiewicz’s Birch Wood and The Maids of Wilko which brought him a Gold Medal at the Moscow International Film Festival for the latter and an Academy Award nomination for the former.

Still from Andrzej Wajda's "Sweet Rush", photo by Fabryka Obrazu / East News — Still from Andrzej Wajda’s Sweet Rush, photo by Fabryka Obrazu / East News

The story describes a meeting between a mature woman grieving after the recent war-time loss of her sons and a young man who could almost be the boys’ peer, and the unexpected surge of feelings between them. Sweet Rush is a discourse between the writer and death. Mrs Marta is fascinated by the young Boguś. The motif is reminiscent of John Irving’s 1998 bestselling novel A Widow for One Year, made into the movie The Door in the Floor by Tod Williams (2004), where, after the death of her grown-up sons a woman enters a sexually tainted relation with boys of the same age as her sons.

The making of the film is closely linked to Wajda’s work with the actress Krystyna Janda who played in Man of Marble, Rough Treatment, The Conductor and Man of Iron. As the actress had recently lost her husband – the great cinematographer and Wajda’s collaborator, Edward Kłosiński – the film was hanging by a thread. But as Wajda said in 2009 for Kino magazine:

The widowed Krystyna decided to accept the part. Her new situation didn’t mean, however, that the film was to be different than we had planned a year earlier. But once our adaptation of Iwaszkiewicz’s story had come together, Krystyna brought me a few pages; I read them, feeling amazed and shaken at how poignantly she described Edward’s last moments and his death on those pages. I believed she had poured out her feelings to me as a friend. But I asked her if she would agree to speak the text to the camera.

That’s how the film gained an extra layer. The film is more than a collection of reflections of an aged master of cinema on the relations between people and their inevitable fate, it is also a moving reflection on the presence of death in every person’s life and – to quote a piece of the dialogue – ‘the ease with which life passes into death’, supported by the actress playing the leading role. ‘A film about a film’, Sweet Rush incorporates scenes when the camera turns away from the set to focus on the crew working on the film – from read-through rehearsals, arranging the set, to bad shots.

Next to the actual story drawn from Iwaszkiewicz’s prose, additionally inspired by a story by Hungarian writer Sándor Márai and shown in a sophisticated visual form (cinematography performed by Paweł Edelman), the film shows artists’ personal experience being processed into the language of cinema. Sweet Rush brought Wajda the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin festival which he dedicated to Krystyna Janda, and the whole film to Edward Kłosiński.

Wałęsa: Man of Hope

A culmination of Wajda’s trilogy: Man of Marble and Man of Iron and Poland’s most anticipated film in 2013, Wajda’s Wałęsa: Man of Hope captures the personal evolution of the legendary labour champion Lech Wałęsa. From electrician to charismatic leader, co-founder of Solidarity, Poland’s first democratically elected president in the post-communist era and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the film portrays the strengths and weaknesses of the Solidarity leader. The script for Wałęsa was written by part-time New Yorker Janusz Głowacki, providing rich context for Polish idiosyncrasies and intricacies that will attract particular appreciation among international audiences. In an interview for Culture.pl, the scriptwriter explains his interest in writing the script:

For me, Wałęsa’s greatness began when he was detained, in the moment when he was alone and the authorities tried to threaten and blackmail him, there were elements of grotesque in all of this, constant despair, fear and pathos that were sometimes almost ridiculous. And that is something that really attracts me in art.

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Andrzej Wajda’s efforts to represent the changes undergone by Wałesa – from shipyard labourer to trade-union activist, charismatic leader, co-founder of Solidarity and Nobel prize-winner, are intertwined with actual footage from the past. Opening with a scene from December 1970, the film finishes with Lech Wałęsa’s speech in the American Congress in November 1989. The film had its world premiere at the 70th Venice International Film Festival and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival days later.

Wajda in the Theatre

Wajda’s debut in the theatre took place in 1959 with the staging of A Hat Full of Rain by Michael Vincente Gazzo at the Gdynia Drama Theatre. In 1963 Wajda began directing at the Kraków’s Stary Teatr, an alliance that started with Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Wedding and continued for many years. The 1960s also saw Wajda direct at Warsaw’s Ateneum Theatre and at a number of theatres abroad.

In 1971, Wajda staged The Possessed, a play by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Starring Jan Nowicki and Wojciech Pszoniak, it was ‘a great performance with a pulsating, dynamic, somewhat hysterical tempo’, wrote Joanna Godlewska (Wrocław, 1999). Next followed the 1974 staging of Stanisław Wyspiański’s November Night. Maciej Karpinski wrote:

Wajda had employed ascetic film-making means to show the tragedy of Maciek Chełmicki’s generation and used a wealth of theatrical resources, as well as a musical score that verged on the operatic to present the tragedy of Maciek’s peers in 1831. Yet the tragedy was the same.

Another major stage production directed by Wajda was that of The Danton Case after a play by Stanisława Przybyszewska. This 1976 performance at Warsaw’s Powszechny Theatre was scant in theatrical effects; instead, the attention of the audience seated on two sides of the acting space was focused on the protagonists, played by Wojciech Pszoniak and Bronisław Pawlik. Indeed, the audience took part, playing the parts of the deputies to the Convention and members of the Tribunal.

The following year brought the Wajda-directed premiere of Antonio Buero Vallejo’s The Dreams of Reason at the Warsaw’s Teatr na Woli, with the superb role of Tadeusz Łomnicki as Francisco Goya. Indeed, this as well as other 1970s performances, including As Years Go by, as Days Go by..., a spectacular play about Kraków at the time of the Young Poland Movement, and Nastassya Filippovna after Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, with brilliant roles of Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Jan Nowicki, secured Wajda’s position of one of the leading Polish theatre directors. Teresa Krzemień wrote, ‘if Wajda’s directing of ‘Nastassia’ had been limited to no more than casting actors in these two great roles, this in itself would have been great directing’ (Kultura, 1977, no. 3).

As in his films, Wajda not afraid to enter the very core of political conflicts in the theatre, as evidenced by Sophocles’ Antigone, which he staged at Kraków’s Stary Theatre in 1984 in the midst of the realities of the martial law. Likewise, he was not afraid of experimenting and cast Teresa Budzisz-Krzyżanowska as Hamlet in the 1989 performance at the Stary Theatre, and Tamasaburo Bando, the Japanese Kabuki star playing female roles, as the leading protagonist in the staging of Nastassya at Tokyo’s Benisan Theatre the same year.

Other theatre plays directed by Wajda in the 1980s and 1990s included: August Strindberg’s Miss Julia (1988, Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw); Szymon An-ski’s Dybbuk (1988, Stary Theatre in Kraków); Mishima Yukio’s Mishima (1994, Stary Theatre in Kraków); Tadeusz Różewicz’s Wrocław Improvisation (1996, Teatr Polski in Wrocław); and Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Curse (1997, Stary Teatr in Kraków).

Wajda adapted some of his theatre productions for television, including The November Night in 1978 and As Years Go by, as Days Go by... was made into a TV series in 1980. In 1977 Wajda adapted Tadeusz Kantor’s famous performance of Dead Class by Teatr Cricot 2 to the screen. More recently, he televised Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski’s Bigda is Coming! in 1999, based on a historic text from the inter-war period, which still managed to carry sentiments about contemporary Poland.

Forty years since it irreversibly altered the Polish theatre scene, Wajda’s adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed resurfaced on the small screen. The Possessed Years Later is a documentary film recalling the theatrical performance and the drama and joy surrounding its staging.

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Wajda School

In 2001, Andrzej Wajda and Wojciech Marczewski formed a film school. Based on the concept of the ‘Film Group’ model, they focused on the effectiveness of the group work method and on the collaboration of generations, and offered a programme that is unique in Europe, combining education with production targeted to film professionals. As part of the programs offered by the school, the most interesting directors of the younger generation, both Polish and foreign, are developing their projects and they often produce them here. More than 50 documentary and feature films, as well as 200 shorts have been produced so far. They have been selected and often won prizes at the most prestigious festivals, including Berlinale, San Sebastian, Karlovy Vary, Hot Docs, IDFA, DOK Leipzig and European Film Awards nominee. The school enjoys the honorary patronage of the European Film Academy. In 2011, continuing the mission of the School, Andrzej Wajda and Wojciech Marczewski established a film production studio – The Wajda Studio. The studio focuses on auteur film projects.

Filmography:

Short films and TV productions:

1951 – The Bad Boy short film
1968 – Roly Poly short science fiction comedy film
1975 – The Promised Land Zia mini TV series
1980 – Z biegiem lat, z biegiem dni, TV series
1988 – The French as seen by... (Proust contre la déchéance)
1996 – My History Notes – documentary TV series
2000 – The Condemnation of Franciszek Klos – TV film

Documentary films:

1951 – The Pottery at Ilza short film
1955 – Towards the Sun
1976 – Dead Class
1977 – Zaproszenie do Wnętrza (Invitation to the Inside, première: 1978)
1979 – Pogoda domu niechaj będzie z tobą... (May the Good Weather Be with You, première: 1980)
1999 – Kredyt i debet (Credit and Debit) – TV documentary
2001 – Lekcja polskiego kina (A Lesson in Polish Cinema, première: 2002) – TV documentary
2001 – Pamiętam (I Remember, part of the American cycle Broken Silence)
2004 – Jan Nowak-Jeziorański 60 lat później. 1944-2004 (Jan Nowak Jeziorański 60 Years Later) – short TV documentary
2010 – Kręć! Jak kochasz, to kręć! (If that’s your passion, roll the camera! )
2015 – Wróblewski według Wajdy / Wróblewski according to Wajda

Feature Films:

1954 – A Generation (Pokolenie)
1956 – Kanał (Sewer, première: 1957)
1958 – Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament)
1959 – Lotna
1960 – Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni czarodzieje)
1961 – Samson
1961 – Siberian Lady Macbeth (Powiatowa lady Makbet, première: 1962)
1962 – Warsaw (Warszawa, an episode i the Love at Twenty film)
1965 – The Ashes (Popioły)
1967 – The Gates to Paradise (Bramy raju, première: 1968)
1968 – Everything for Sale (Wszystko na sprzedaż, première: 1969)
1969 – Hunting Flies (Polowanie na muchy)
Landscape After the Battle (Krajobraz po bitwie)
1970 – The Birch Wood (Brzezina)
1971 – Pilate and Others (Pilatus und andere)
1972 – The Wedding (Wesele, première: 1973)
1974 – The Promised Land (Ziemia obiecana, première: 1975)
1976 – The Shadow Line (Smuga cienia)
1976 – Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, première: 1977)
1978 – Without Anesthesia aka Rough Treatment (Bez znieczulenia)
1979 – The Maids of Wilko (Panny z Wilka)
1979 – The Orchestra Conductor (Dyrygent, première: 1980)
1981 – Man of Iron (Człowiek z żelaza)
1982 – Danton (première: 1983)
1983 – A Love in Germany (Eine Liebe in Deutschland, Polish première: 1990)
1985 – A Chronicle of Amorous Accidents (Kronika wypadków miłosnych, première: 1986)
1987 – The Possessed (Les possédes, première: 1988)
1990 – Korczak
1992 – The Crowned-Eagle Ring (Pierścionek z orłem w koronie, première: 1993)
1993 – Nastasja (première: 1994)
1995 – Holy Week (Wielki Tydzień)
1996 – Miss Nobody (Panna Nikt)
1999 – Pan Tadeusz
2002 – The Revenge (Zemsta)
2005 – Man of Hope (Człowiek z nadziei, short film)
2007 – Katyń
2008 – Sweet Rush (Tatarak, première: 2009)
2012 – Wałęsa. Man of Hope (Wałęsa. Człowiek z nadziei)
2016 – Afterimage

Major awards and distinctions:

1955 – Polish State Award for directing the film Generation
1957 – Special Jury Award at the Cannes International Film Festival for Kanal
1959 – Jury and FIPRESCI Award at the International Film Festival in Venice for Ashes and Diamonds
1968 – Polish Radio and Television Committee Award for directing the TV film Roly Poly
1971 – Minister of Art and Culture 1st Degree Award for Recent Directing Projects
1973 – Silver Shell at the San Sebastian International Film Festival for directing The Wedding
1974 – won viewers’ poll at the 6th Łagów Film Summer for the best debut of the past thirty years, for Generation; Polish State Award of 1st Degree for outstanding achievement in film directing; The Yeast Award of the Polityka weekly; Golden Camera Award of the Film monthly for The Wedding as the best feature film
1975 – main prize at the Opole Theatrical Confrontations for the staging of Stanisława Przybyszewska’s The Danton Case at Warsaw’s Teatr Powszechny; Minister of Art and Culture 1st Degree Award; Golden Lions at the 2nd Polish Feature Film Festival in Gdańsk for The Promised Land; 2nd Class Order of the Labour Standard on the occasion of 30th anniversary of cinematography in the People’s Republic of Poland
1976 – Journalists Award at the 3rd Brussels International Film Festival for The Promised Land; Golden Spike for The Promised Land at the Valladolid Film Week; Diploma of the Minister of Foreign Affairs for outstanding contribution to the promotion of Polish culture abroad; Chairman of the Polish Radio and Television Committee Award
1978 – Premio David di Donatello “Luchino Visconti” for artistic merit of films, variety of topics and life achievement; Jury Award and Best Director Award at the 18th International Film Festival at Cartagena, Columbia, for The Promised Land; Jury Award at the 19th International Neorealist Film Festival at Avelino, Italy, for The Promised Land; Gdańsk Golden Lions at the 5th Polish Feature Film Festival in Gdańsk for Rough Treatment; FIPRESCI Award at the Cannes International Film Festival for Man of Marble
1979 – Gdansk Golden Lions at the 6th Polish Feature Film Festival for The Maids of Wilko; Ecumenical Jury Award at the Cannes International Film Festival for Rough Treatment
1979 – Life Achievement Award at the La Rochelle International Film Festival; Order of Cyril and Methodius for contribution to the development of Polish-Bulgarian cultural co-operation
1980 – Special Golden Bunch of Grapes at the 12th Lubuskie Film Summer at Łagów for discovering and supporting the development of new acting talent; Chairman of the Polish Radio and Television Committee 1st Degree Award for achievement of particular value and for co-operation with Polish public television; FIPRESCI, OCIC and Basque Cultural Society awards at the San Sebastian International Film Festival for The Orchestra Conductor
1981 – Doctor Honoris Causa of the American University in Washington; Palme d’Or and Ecumenical Jury Award at the Cannes International Film Festival for Man of Iron
1982 – France’s Legion d’Honneur; Onassis Foundation Award for work for human rights and dignity
1983 – Cesar Award of the French Academy of Film Art and Technology for Danton
1985 – The Gottfried Herder Prize for contribution to strengthening cultural relations with nations of Eastern and Southern Europe
1986 – The Luigi Pirandello Award for activity and achievement in the area of theatre
1987 – Kyoto Prize of the Japanese Inamori Foundation for contribution to the development of science, technology and ideas
1989 – Doctor Honoris Causa of Jagiellonian University
1990 – European Felix Award for life achievement; mention of the Jury for Korczak, outstanding achievement and artistic conduct at the Cannes International Film Festival
1991 – BESEF’91 diploma for life achievement at the 1st Central-European Film Festival at Belgrade (BESEF); Chairman of the Cinematography Commission at the Ministry of Culture Award for directing Korczak
1993 – Honorary Member Diploma of the Playwrights and Theatre Critics Association (on the occasion of the Association’s 75th anniversary); award at the 18th Opole Theatre Confrontations for directing Stanisław Wyspiański’s The Wedding at Kraków’s Stary Teatr
1994 – French Order of Fine Arts and Humanities; title of an honorary professor of Kraków’s Fine Arts Academy; Artur Award of the Łódź Museum of Cinematography
1995 – Japanese Order of the Rising Sun; Doctor Honoris Causa of Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; award of the Polish ITI centre for the promotion of the Polish theatre abroad; Doctor Honoris Causa of the Lyon 2 Lumière University in Lyon, France
1996 – Super Golden Duck – “Film” magazine readers’ award for The Promised Land; Praemium Imperiale Award of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Art; Warsaw Literary Premiere Award for the book “Wajda: The Films”; Silver Berlin Bear for life achievement and, specifically, for Holy Week, at the 46th International Film Festival in Berlin
1997 – Best Director Award for Miss Nothing at the 13th International Film Festival in Troi, Portugal
1998 – Minister of Art and Culture Award for films; title of Honorary Citizen of the City of Łódź; Golden Lions for life achievement and outstanding contribution to the history of the cinema at the International Film Festival in Venice
1999 – Freedom Award for film-making and for “unparalleled commitment to freedom” at the Freedom Film Festival in Berlin; the Crystal Iris for life achievement at the International Film Festival in Brussels; the title of the Małopolanin of the Year 1999; the Diamond Ticket of the Polish Film Association for Pan Tadeusz, the film with the largest audience
2000 – Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, Los Angeles
2000 – Warsaw’s 400th Anniversary Medal; Special Jury Award for the Director-Operator Team (Andrzej Wajda – Witold Sobocinski) at the 8th CAMERIMAGE Festival in Łódź; title of Kraków’s Honorary Citizen of 1999 for “emotions sparked off by his films”; The Gazeta Krakowska plebiscite’s Man of the Year 1999 title; Doctor Honoris Causa of the Polish National Film, Television and Theater School in Łódź; the Teatr Magazine Konrad Swinarski Award for directing the TV production of Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski Bigda is coming!; Doctor Honoris Causa of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts; title of the Honorary Citizen of Radom; title of the Honorary Citizen of Gdynia; Honorary Award for the best adaptation of Polish classics for the TV Theatre for Bigda is coming! at the 25th Opole Theatre Confrontations; The Polish Eagle Film Award for life achievement; the American Film Academy Oscar Award for life achievement; Golden Film Award of the Film Script Group at the Polish Film Association for Pan Tadeusz; the 1999 Grand Award of the Culture Foundation for outstanding achievement in the area of culture for Pan Tadeusz and Bigda is coming!; title of the Most Famous Pole of the Year 1999 awarded by the Polish Radio listeners; title of the Honorary Citizen of Suwałki; Man of the Year of the Życie daily newspaper; title of Super Wiktor; Man of the Year 1999 of the Wprost magazine
2001 – Commander’s Cross of Legion d’Honneur of the French Republic; German Great Cross of the Order of Merit; Doctor Honoris Causa of the Moscow Theatre Academy (GITIS); Grand Prix in the TV Theatre Category for Bigda is coming! at the Sopot Two Theatres Festival; Human Matters Improvement Award of the Czech Pangea Foundation for artistic output and its ethical values
2002 – The Little Prince’s Rose – awarded for special contribution to national and global culture; Doctor Honoris Causa of Łódź University; Business Centre Club’s Special Award for contribution to the development of business and market economy in Poland
2007 – American Film Academy Oscar nomination for best Foreign Language film for Katyń
2010 – Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation from the President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev
2011- Order of the White Eagle bestowed as the highest Polish distinction by Polish President Bronisław Komorowski

Author: Monika Mokrzycka-Pokora, August 2003; updated by GS, Jan 2016; updated by AZ, Feb 2020