In 2016, acclaimed and highly awarded Polish director, Andrzej Wajda, celebrated his 90th birthday and 40th feature film, Afterimage. He had long wanted to make a film about an artist. Wajda, died following the film’s premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, having made films for over sixty years. Unlike other Polish directors who left for the protective shores of the West, Wajda remained in Poland examining its history and society. He won hundreds of film awards all over the world including the top prizes at Cannes, Venice, Berlin and was awarded an honorary Academy Award for his contribution to cinema in 2000.
In post-war Poland, renowned painter Wladyslaw Strzemiński, who only began painting after the amputation of an arm and leg, works as a professor at the National School of Fine Arts in Łódź. A great artist and master whose works were presented from Moscow to Paris; co-creator of the theory of Unism, Strzemiński he became famous before the Second World War. His students still treat him like the “messiah of modern painting”, but university authorities and the Ministry of Culture have a very different opinion. Unlike artists loyal to the doctrines of socialist realism and fulfilling Party tasks, Strzemiński does not compromise his art as the Communist authorities strive to ruin him…
Saturday 19th August
98 min
15+
Film Festival
