Man of Iron, Człowiek z Żelaza, 1981, 147 min.
Sunday, November 2, 7:00 pm
Director: Andrzej Wajda
Screenwriter: Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski
Principal Cast:Jerzy Radziwiłłowicz, Krystyna Janda, Marian Opania
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nominee, Man of Iron takes up the story of Andrzej Wajda’s previous 1976 movie entitled Man of Marble. In Man of Iron, the great Jerzy Radziwiłowicz stars as Maciej Tomczyk, a union organiser at the Gdansk shipyards, whose character is modeled on real-life Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa. Radziwiłowicz, who also played the role of Mateusz Birkut, in the 1976 film Man of Marble , is now both Birkut’s son and in flashback, the father. The film depicts the rise of the Solidarity worker's union movement and complicated human fates in the dawn of a new political era. It is an homage,as well as testimony to the price paid by the determined labourers who opposed the authorities. The film shows what the strike at the Gdańsk shipyard was like and where the smart resistance of the Polish shipyard workers stemmed from. It was made during the brief thaw in Communist censorship that appeared between the formation of Solidarity in August 1980 and its suppression in December 1981, and, as such ,it is remarkably critical of the Communist regime.