Party officials brought him around the country to demonstrate his bricklaying records; artists used him as a model for their sculptures; filmmakers made propaganda movies about him. Company Credits

She’s heading toward the dusty warehouse, where the statues from the 1950s are stored — in the Poland of the 1970s, such monuments are an embarrassing relic of an equally embarrassing past. After the victory, Tomczyk visits the site of his father’s death. The Question and Answer section for Wadjda is a great He gets a new job as an inspector of labor who is supposed to take care of the welfare of his colleagues. But Wajda shows us that no system is ever fully closed, which is the most important point for the future. In the end, her husband leaves, but she buys the bicycle for her daughter. In the end, her husband leaves, but she buys the bicycle for her daughter. The filmmakers had been asked to make a short movie, showing what Solidarity meant for them. Wałęsa is vain, pompous, self-important, and his tale almost completely ignores the social movement behind him. In one clip, we see the workers protesting about the quality of the food they received for dinner. Filming & Production These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Wadjda, directed by Haifaa al-Mansour. However, as we draw closer to the climax of the story — the fall of Communism in 1989 — the working class increasingly fades from view. Man of Marble had depicted the paradoxes and contradictions of Stalinism. But the strength of the “Man of” trilogy is its ability to inspire us to something more than simply dredging up a submerged past. What we see in flashbacks often contradicts the things Wałęsa says to Fallaci. Abdullah's uncle is a highly regarded politician in Saudi Arabia. Wajda had a good personal relationship with Tejchma and brought him a new draft of the screenplay for Man of Marble, whereupon Tejchma gave the production a green light. As Burski explained to the official, it would help both of their careers. Before that happened, Wajda was able to screen the movie before Polish audiences, thanks to a wide distribution in the country’s cinemas. It won instant recognition as a classic.

Meanwhile, Birkut’s friend Wincenty Witek is caught up in the purges of the late Stalinist era. Wałęsa tells the story of his life in the course of answering her questions, and we watch that story in flashbacks. Man of Iron was seen by 5 million people. He encouraged filmmakers to produce movies that addressed contemporary social issues. When Winkiel is leaving the shipyard, he encounters a local apparatchik who doesn’t seem too bothered by what’s just happened. Audiences found in the film not only a critical view of Stalinism, but also a voice of protest against deceit, compromise, and corruption in the Poland of the mid-’70s, which was supposed to have left those days behind. Wadjda essays are academic essays for citation. Written by people who wish to remain anonymous. Technical Specs, See agents for this cast & crew on IMDbPro, adr supervisor: KSA (as Sultan Al Mutairi), digital image technician / focus puller: "b" camera, additional assistant electrician (as Ahmed Shaban), composer: opening song / performer: opening song, dialogue continuity: Arabic (as Sultan Al Mutairi), managing director: Millimeter Productions, creative and sales managing director: Rotana Studios, additional extras coordinator: school (as Mohammed Khaiat), the production wishes to thanks (as HRH Prince Al Wafeed Bin Talal).

Cement is a typical example of a socialist-realist movie — the only aesthetic approach to cinema permitted in the years 1949–54. Her father isn’t around much, and her mother is convinced he’s busy looking for a second wife. Of course, it would be impossible to repeat what happened then in Gdańsk today: the big industrial working class of that era disappeared in the Poland of the 1990s, and it’s not coming back. Abdullah is a friend of Wadjda's who has a bike. When Wadjda wins the Quran recital competition and says she will use the money to buy a bicycle, Ms. Hussa takes her prize money to donate it to the Muslim brothers in Palestine rather than let her keep it for a purpose she deems as immoral. On August 30, Poland’s government signed an agreement with the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee, recognizing its most important demands, including the right to create free, self-governing unions, independent from the state. It is precisely because of this track record that Witek comes under suspicion, accused of ties with Western intelligence agencies (like many real-life communists in Eastern Europe).

resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. The first three scenes of the striking shipyard in Man of Iron — all consisting of archival, documentary footage — are very interesting from this point of view. Get our print magazine for just $20 a year. Man of Marble is a reckoning with that kind of cinema, subverting its main tropes.

Having subverted the aesthetics of socialist realism in Man of Marble, Wajda now deployed many of its tropes in Man of Iron to denounce the politics of communist Poland. In a way, today’s Polish left finds itself in the same situation as Agnieszka: we have to break into the warehouses and closets where the popular history of people like Birkut is stored, and bring it to public light. The police brutally repressed their protests, bringing an end to the honeymoon between Polish society and Edward Gierek, who had become first secretary of the ruling party in December 1970. Help Us Stick Around for Many More. He constantly tries to present himself as a strong leader who can see better and further than both workers and intellectuals. Wajda conveniently finishes his narrative in November 1989, the moment when Wałęsa addressed a joint session of the US Congress. Polish director Andrzej Wajda created an exhilarating form of political cinema that helped shape events as well as depicting them on screen. Unlike Birkut, Witek is a veteran communist of the prewar generation, who fought with the International Brigades in Spain and spent time in a French detention camp. The tractor company went bust after 1989, and its buildings were torn down. The student director Agnieszka discovers the grim reality of Nowa Huta recorded in stock footage that was never shown to the public. Then an accident opens his eyes. Martial law crushed Solidarity as a mass social movement. Ursus had been built up around a plant producing tractors. Sometimes, it takes just a spark to provide us with a view of something entirely different. Adam Ważyk graphically described the case of Nowa Huta in his “Poem for Adults” (1955). Wajda took the “commission” from the striking worker very seriously, and he worked extremely fast. Narratively, Wajda constructed Man of Marble in a similar way to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, unveiling the truth about Birkut though a serious of flashbacks, narrated by different characters from his life, with whom Agnieszka meets in her investigation of Birkut’s past. The workers lived in terrible, unsanitary conditions; they were overworked; alcoholism and petty crimes were rampant. In the end, her mother purchases the bike for her after her father has left her and her mother. Marek Edelman and the Struggle for Democracy in Poland, How Poland’s Road To Socialism Was Blocked, Isaac Deutscher and the Fate of Polish Communism, The Triumph and Tragedy of Poland’s Solidarity Movement, Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity, Issue 35: From Socialism to Populism and Back. As we know, it did. In 2018, Jaśmina Wójcik made a documentary feature, Symphony of the Ursus Factory, in which she sought to resurrect the working-class memory of Ursus, a town near Warsaw (and today one of its outlying districts).

At the same time as this was happening, Polish cinema abandoned the working classes. Wadjda, the subject of Haifaa Al-Mansour’s seminal movie of the same name, is twelve years old. Birkut is released from prison in the wave of de-Stalinization after October 1956, and he chooses to live as a private person in Gdynia. In the first, the workers are praying. Man of Marble follows a young filmmaker, Agnieszka, who is struggling to produce a documentary about a forgotten (and fictional) icon called Mateusz Birkut. The image of the Lenin Shipyard in the final scene turned out to be prophetic. In Man of Marble, not all is “dross.” The workers of Nowa Huta are finally growing tired of a diet based on empty promises. Catalyst, a new journal published by Jacobin, is out now. The first movie anticipated — and contributed to — the rise of Solidarity, while the second documented the movement’s triumphal emergence, before the coup of December 1981 that drove it underground. Birkut finally ends up in jail after trying to save his friend from a political trial.

She makes bracelets in order to sell to earn the SR800 it costs. To the extent that filmmakers criticized the post-communist system at all, it was usually from the viewpoint of the Polish intelligentsia, whose ethos and social position had been threatened by the new civilization of money and vulgar consumerism. It’s understandable, in a way, that Wajda chose to depict the 1980s in this manner. In the second, we see a group of workers expressing their grievances: with unrepresentative, state-controlled unions, with high prices and low wages, with the authorities denying them both voice and respect. Wadjda ist eigentlich ein ganz normales zehnjähriges Mädchen: Sie hört gern Popmusik, verkauft selbst gemachte Armbänder auf dem Schulhof und wünscht sich nichts sehnlicher als ein grünes Fahrrad, das sie in einem Spielwarengeschäft entdeckt hat.

Despite his long record as a communist militant, the prosecution depicts him as an imperialist agent who was tasked with the mission of destroying the efforts of the Polish working class.