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Taking place alongside the main London programme, the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival – organised by the Polish Cultural Institute in London – is embarking on a UK-wide tour with a striking retrospective of films by Andrzej Wajda. Marking the 100th anniversary of the legendary director’s birth, the festival arrives in Edinburgh from 7 March to 2 April.
In 2026, the festival continues its tradition of retrospectives of grand film directors, celebrating the centenary of Andrzej Wajda’s birth with a retrospective that spans six decades of the filmmaker’s work. The retrospective will present and analyse the Academy Award-winning director’s politically engaged filmmaking career from his early years making films under post-war communism to his work during the Solidarność movement.
Spearheading Kinoteka on Tour is Wajda’s revered classic Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1958), which will be screening in Edinburgh from a 35mm print alongside a number of other films from the director’s illustrious career.
‘Wajda had a long, creative career and left behind an extraordinary legacy. His works were inspiring around the world.’ – Martin Scorsese
EDINBURGH LINE-UP
In the last days of the Second World War, Maciek, a Polish resistance fighter, is tasked with the assassination of a Communist official. When he meets Krystyna, he is offered a glimpse of a world beyond war and destruction, and questions his assignment. Wajda’s classic drama, which cemented his position as a world-class filmmaker, features an iconic central performance by Cybulski – the ‘Polish James Dean’ – who contributes immeasurably to this probing look at the complex post-war future for a new nation and its people. It’s essential viewing.
The Palme d’Or-winning follow-up to Man of Marble sees Winkel, a Communist-friendly radio journalist, charged with finding compromising information about a Solidarity opposition leader. But in witnessing protesting workers’ fight against political propaganda and commitment to overturn a repressive regime, Winkel questions his own beliefs. Directly addressing the contemporary political situation as Poland entered the 1980s, Man of Iron combines fact and fiction to stunning effect, resulting in one of Wajda’s most profound artistic achievements.
Andrzej Żuławski was adamant that his tale of dissolution of a marriage (with Adjani and Sam Neill at their most visceral and anguished) was in fact a Cold War parable of pure evil infiltrating the West through the cracks of the Berlin Wall (prominently featured in the opening credits). Set to a hypnotic, percussive synth score by Andrzej Korzyński, Possession remains one of a kind — a true horror masterpiece, an acting tour de force, as well as a work of lacerating autobiography, in which Żuławski reworks his own split from his wife Małgorzata Braunek in terms of a delirious genre ride.
Following his lauded war trilogy, Wajda turned his camera on Poland’s socially modern but politically disengaged post-war generation. When hipster doctor Bazyli meets out-of-towner Pelagia in a nightclub, they spend a night in his flat flirting to the jazz tunes of Krzysztof Komeda. Embracing a style similar to the contemporaneous French New Wave, this is a vivid portrait of disillusioned youth.
In the 1970s, young filmmaker Agnieszka investigates the life of a 1950s bricklayer and worker’s hero. When she learns that the facts behind his story were suppressed, she has to decide whether to pursue the truth or not. Man of Marble is a thought-provoking examination of the moral responsibility of an individual and art in challenging dominant ideology, censorship and oppressive authorities. It’s a powerful milestone in Polish cinema.
After the death of a close friend, Wiktor returns to a place of his youth. He reencourages a group of sisters with whom he spent an idyllic summer 15 years prior, discovering the extent to which their lives have changed. Wajda’s most lyrical and poetic work marked a shift in pace and tone, allowing him to meditate on questions of passing time, regret and unfulfilled love.
Wajda focuses on personal stories and a wider human tragedy in this Oscar-nominated film, set against one of the most painful and politically sensitive topics in Polish history: the 1940 massacre of thousands of Polish soldiers and intellectuals in the Katyn forest. A personal project for Wajda, whose father was murdered in the massacre, Katyn poignantly frames historical events through the stories of women looking for the truth about their missing relatives.
In his final film, Wajda returns to previously explored themes of personal and artistic resistance to an authoritarian state and ideology. Based on the life of avant-garde painter and theorist Władysław Strzemiński, the film chronicles his struggles against expulsion from state institutions, and erasure from a nation’s collective memory, as a result of political and artistic convictions that were at odds with the official Stalinist post-war doctrine.
Kinoteka on Tour takes place at Edinburgh FilmHouse 7 March – 2 April 2026
For further information: https://kinoteka.org.uk/
Facebook: @PolishFilmFestivalKinoteka
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