Working with a screenplay by Jerzy Andrzejewski (Ashes and Diamonds) and a very young Jerzy Skolimowski, Wajda chronicles a soft bohemia made up of motor scooters, easy flirtations, and jazz enjoyed by a group of Warsaw twenty-somethings. Bazyli (Tadeusz Ɓomnicki), a recent graduate from medical school, is more dedicated to playing drums than to pursuing his profession. Fellow hipster Edmund (Zbigniew Cybulski) asks Bazyli’s help in attracting the attention of a beautiful young woman, but it’s Bazyli who winds up walking her to the train station, after the last train has already departed. Innocent Sorcerers brilliantly captures the post-Stalin thaw that had begun to sweep through the Eastern bloc countries by the late 1950s while mediating on the pleasures and terror that freedom can bring.

Please note that the February 12 screening of this film will take place in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.