Andrzej Wajda; photo - east news

President Bronisław Komorowski is to decorate Poland’s internationally famous film and theatre director Andrzej Wajda with the Order of White Eagle, the highest Polish state distinction.

The ceremony is scheduled for 21 March. On Sunday, 6 March, Wajda turns 85.

Something of a dilemma for communist-era government, Wajda won national prestige through his international success, yet he often made critiques of the Soviet system, most memorably in Man of Marble (1978) and Man of Iron (1981), two films which became icons of the Solidarity protest movement, the latter winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

A recent investigation by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which revealed that Wajda had one of the largest files of any figure in his profession, likewise showed that he never cooperated with the security services, a factor which set him apart from many prominent figures in the arts.

Wajda first studied painting at the Fine Art Academy in Kraków but after three years, in 1949, he took up studies at the Film School in Łódź. A Generation, made in 1955, was his directorial debut.

He is one of the founding members of what has become known as the Polish School of film. His 1957 feature – Ashes and Diamonds -  belongs to his most acclaimed movies. It portrays the dilemma of a James Dean-style hero who must chose  between a futile fight against Soviet-imposed communism and accepting a political system he despises.

The film was a manifesto of the ‘lost generation’ of Polish intellectuals whose struggle against German invaders could not prevent Poland from falling into the hands of the communists after World War Two.

Fifty years after Ashes and Diamonds, Wajda made Katyn about the massacre of Polish officers in Soviet Russia in 1940, a very personal film if only because his father was among the victims of that crime.  In between these two films were such masterpieces as Canal (Silver Palm at the Cannes Festival in 1957), Everything for Sale (1969), Birchwood (1970), The Wedding (1973), The Promised Land (1975), Man of Marble (1977), Maids of Wilko (1979), Man of Iron (Golden Palm in Cannes in 1981) and Danton (1983). 

Wajda is soon to embark  on a new project based on the life and career of Lech Wałęsa.

In 2000 Wajda received an Oscar for Lifetime Achievment. Several of his films (The Promised Land, The Maids of Wilko, Man of Marble,  and Katyn) won Oscar nominations in the Best Foreign Film category.

He has also established a fine reputation as a theatre director, working mainly with the Stary Theatre company in Kraków. (mk/nh/pg)