Based on the life of avant-garde painter and theorist Władysław Strzemiński, Afterimage dovetails the final years of the artist’s life with the rise of Socialist Realism in Poland. As a teacher at Łódź’s State Higher School of the Visual Arts, Strzemiński refuses to respect the Stalinist doctrine of university authorities and the Ministry of Culture and Art, who exert vicious bureaucratic methods to silence his voice and ability to work. An impassioned memorial to a great painter, Wajda’s last film is also a stark observation of a political mechanism that nearly erased one of Poland’s most important artists from public memory.