Ashes and Diamonds

The culminating film of Andrzej Wajda's war trilogy, Ashes and Diamonds (1958) is widely regarded as the masterpiece of postwar Polish cinema. Set on the very last day of the war, it captures a nation suspended between the trauma it is leaving and the Soviet-aligned order about to descend, and it made an international star of its lead.

Zbigniew Cybulski, often called the Polish James Dean, plays Maciek, the resistance fighter in dark glasses tasked with an assassination he comes to doubt. Wajda directs in a charged Baroque style — deep-focus black and white, churning with Catholic and national symbolism, from a crucifix hung upside down to fireworks bursting over a victory ball — that turned political allegory into something close to tragedy.

Made during the cultural thaw of the late fifties, the film spoke to a generation and established Wajda, later an Oscar honoree, as the conscience of Polish cinema. Its imagery and its doomed romantic hero influenced film-makers across Eastern Europe and beyond, Martin Scorsese among its admirers. Searing, symbol-laden and humane, it remains the essential film about the moral cost of war's end and the uncertain peace that followed. Cybulski's early death in a railway accident only deepened the legend of his doomed romantic hero, and the film's reputation has grown steadily since. Wajda would go on to a Palme d'Or and an honorary Oscar, but for many this remains the defining statement of his long and courageous career.