Academy Award-winning Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda died on Sunday, 9 October. He was 90.
Born on 6 March 1926, in Suwalki, a town near Poland’s border with Lithuania, Wajda is best known internationally for his World War II trilogy A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds. His latest film, the biopic Afterimage, had recently been selected as Poland’s submission to the foreign language category for the 2016 Oscars. In 2000, he was honoured by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences with an honorary Oscar in recognition of a lifetime of work.
Wajda’s father was a cavalry officer, one of thousands of Polish officers taken prisoner and killed by the Russians in the Katyn Forest in western Russia and two other locations. The incident, known simply as Katyn, deeply influenced Wajda – and an entire generation in Poland. The official version of events under Communist rule insisted that the Polish officers had been killed by the Germans. In 1991, Wajda, by then an elected senator in post-Communist Poland, made a documentary called The Katyn Forest in homage to his father and those murdered with him. In 2007, a feature film on the same story was made and it was an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film.
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Poland’s history under the Soviet Union was the basis for two of his most acclaimed works, Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981) that won the Cannes Palme d’Or that year.
Wajda is survived by his fourth wife, theatre costume designer and actress Krystyna Zachwatowicz, and by a daughter from his third marriage to popular actress Beata Tyszkiewicz.
Feature Image Courtesy: Variety