A short introduction in English language, followed by a screening of a Polish classic with English subtitles!

One of the most famous films in Polish cinema—a story of a young resistance fighter torn between duty and the desire for a normal life, blending romantic ethos with the tragic fate of the “cursed.” 

The final days of World War II. A young Home Army soldier, Maciek Chełmicki, is ordered to carry out one last mission: to assassinate a communist official arriving in a provincial town to take over power. As the hours pass, Maciek begins to question the sense of endless fighting, starts a brief romance with a hotel bartender, and observes a prewar elite celebrating the end of the old world. After years of war, Maciek longs simply to live and to love, yet he remains bound by duty, memory of the fallen, and the expectation of self-sacrifice.

Made during the political “Thaw,” this adaptation of Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel significantly reworked the tensions and tones of its Stalinist-era source. Andrzejewski had conceived his book as an attempt to bridge the divides within Polish society, viewing the protagonists’ sacrifice as a final necessity after which weapons should be laid down and the country rebuilt—since the outcome of Yalta lay beyond Poland’s control. A few years later, such hopes seemed naïve: Stalinism revealed itself as a brutal repression marked by show trials, executions, propaganda, and anonymous graves. Wajda’s updating of the novel was shaped in close collaboration with Zbigniew Cybulski, whose modern, James Dean–inflected performance became one of the enduring myths of Polish culture.

Aware of inevitable censorship, the filmmakers turned to ellipsis and metaphor: the iconic scene of burning vodka glasses (in fact symbolic votive lights for Home Army soldiers killed during the war and Stalinist period, long denied public commemoration), the ruined church with an upside-down Christ, and the final images set on a garbage dump—read by audiences as a stark indictment of the authorities’ disregard for the sacrifice of thousands of young fighters, cast onto the rubbish heap of history. Maciek’s fate thus resonates both with Polish Romanticism (the title comes from a poem by Norwid) and with the post-1956 moral climate. To this day, the film remains the most powerful cinematic portrayal of the tragic destiny of Poland’s “cursed soldiers.”

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