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Andrzej Wajda, born in Suwałki (Poland) on March 6, 1926, was the interpreter, with his works, of the vicissitudes of the tormented history of his country. The son of a Polish army cavalry officer killed in the notorious Katyń massacre of 1940, he still takes part in the resistance against the Nazi occupation of Poland. He enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and later at the High School of Cinema in Łódź, where he graduated in 1954. After directing a series of documentaries and short films, he worked as assistant to Aleksander Ford for the film Five from Barska Street (1954), and gets the opportunity to direct his first feature film, Generation (1955). The two subsequent films, Kanal(1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), awarded respectively in Cannes and in Venice, complete an ideal trilogy on the war and the horrors it has inflicted on its generation. Interested in making allegorical and committed films, Wajda is also able to direct films with important budgets for the general public, such as The Ashes (1965). In 1975 The Promised Land won the Moscow Festival and became the first of his films to get an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, followed by a second with The Maids of Wilko in 1979. With Man of Iron (1981), the Polish filmmaker wins the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and gets the third Oscar nomination. The film describes the first successes of the Solidarność movement. Just the involvement of Andrzej Wajda in the movement will be the main cause of his marginalization in Poland, following the coup d’etat in 1981. Then he moves to France, where he directs Danton (1983). When the political situation changes in Poland in Poland (and in the rest of the world), Wajda can finally return home, where he obtains the artistic direction of the Powszchny Theater in Warsaw and is elected senator. In 1990 he became the third European director, after Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, to win the European Film Awards for his career. In 1998 the Golden Lion for Lifetime and in 2000 the Academy Award. The artistic life of the director continues and in 2007 he created a work linked not only to a tragedy of Polish history, but also to his personal story: Katyń. The film won the Golden Globe as best foreign film in Italy, and it is worth to Andrzej Wajda his fourth nomination for the Oscar for best foreign film. In 2013 he is once again in Venice with Walesa: Man of Hope, a biopic dedicated to the historic leader of Solidarność, Lech Walesa. Wajda dies in Warsaw on October 9, 2016. His latest film Afterimage is presented posthumously at the Rome Film Festival 2016.
