An impassioned memorial to the great avant-garde artist and theorist Władysław Strzemiński, 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.

The extraordinary final installment in Wajda’s war trilogy takes place on the last day of the war and the first day of peace, when a young Home Army soldier (Zbigniew Cybulski, in his most famous role) is assigned to assassinate a Communist official.

Shooting in the U.S. for the first time, Wajda meditates on the grey area between art and life through the story of John/Jan Lasocki (John Gielgud), an internationally famous orchestra conductor who emigrated from his native Poland 50 years earlier.

Colored by the obligatory exaggeration of a Communist resistance, Wajda’s first feature contrasts official reports of wartime heroics with cruel reality—announcing one of the most durable careers in world cinema.

Wajda chronicles a soft bohemia made up of motor scooters, easy flirtations, and jazz enjoyed by a group of Warsaw twenty-somethings in Innocent Sorcerers, brilliantly capturing the pleasures and terrors that began to sweep through the Eastern bloc countries by the late ‘50s.

An unforgettably vivid depiction of the last days of the 1944 Warsaw uprising against the German Nazis, the second film of Wajda’s war trilogy follows a band of surviving Polish Home Army soldiers that takes to the sewers to avoid capture.

After a string of hard-hitting political works that roused the censors’ ire and brought him into the international spotlight, Wajda deliberately changed pace with The Maids of Wilko, a wistful, elegiac, almost Chekhovian recreation of a long-vanished Poland.

Wajda’s Palme d’Or–winning masterpiece follows the workers’ strike in August 1980, which led to the formation of the Solidarity trade union. This (loosely defined) sequel to Man of Marble is, in retrospect, as much about the end of an era as the dawn of a new one.

In Wajda’s powerful meditation on art and politics, young filmmaker Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda) explores the life of Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), a now-discredited labor hero of the 1950s who is remembered only through the statues made of him residing in cellars and storage lockers.

After he raises the issue of freedom of the press on television, a successful journalist’s world begins to fall apart. Rough Treatment does for contemporary Poland what Man of Marble did for the recent past: reveal the everyday dishonesty and hypocrisy that holds the system together.

In 19th-century Łódź, just then becoming a major manufacturing center, three friends decide to ride the industrial wave by establishing a modern textile factory. This film is regularly counted among the greatest Polish films ever made.