EFP 78: Michał Oleszczyk on Andrzej Wajda

On this episode, host Dr Pasquale Iannone marks the centenary of one of the towering figures of world cinema, the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda. Born in 1926, Wajda was a clear-eyed and sensitive chronicler of Polish history, literature and culture in a film career spanning more than 65 years. He is probably best known for his war trilogy of the mid to late 1950s - A Generation (1955), Kanał (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) - politically-committed, formally daring films which chronicled Polish experience of WWII and its aftermath. Joining Pasquale to discuss Wajda is film scholar, critic and programmer Michał Oleszczyk. Based in Warsaw, Michał has written extensively on Wajda and earlier this year he programmed a special strand for the Kinoteka Polish Festival focusing on the artistic kinship between Wajda and one of his former assistants Andrzej Żuławski. Michał also contributed to a major Wajda season at BFI Southbank.Michał and Pasquale position Wajda in the context of post-war Polish cinema, they look at the three films in his war trilogy and they also explore some of his later features, including one lesser-known title starring Sir John Gielgud that was in Ingmar Bergman’s Top 10 Films of All Time.