My task as director is not just to provide a nice evening’s entertainment. The most important thing is to make people think. — Andrej Wajda, Academy Award Tribute The Horrors of Nazism and the Tragedies of Communism Our movie this month, Ashes and Diamonds (1958), brings the horrors of Nazism ...

Ashes and Diamonds (1958) is the third among director Andrzej Wajda’s trilogy of war films – the first, A Generation (1955), and the second, Kanal (1957), which won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Ashes and Diamonds won the film critics award at the Venice Film Festival. These were among ...

The official socialist realist system—with its predictable conflicts, its negative types and positive heroes, and its progressive and optimistic resolutions, encouraged the production of grossly distorted representations of actual life and actual history. —Eagle (1982) The essence of a political film is in speaking about what is unspoken; in exposing ...

The film industry’s battle with censorship began following the 1979 Islāmic Revolution, when strict censorship laws were enacted that forbade films to depict couples touching or a woman to appear on-screen without wearing Islāmic garments that hid her hair and body shape. —Record The [Academy] award was a moment of ...

BUT the human mind is not a film which registers once and for all each impression that comes through its shutters and lenses. The human mind is endlessly and persistently creative. The pictures fade or combine, are sharpened here, condensed there, as we make them more completely our own. They ...