Died of Andrzej Wajda, the director, who challenged the communist Poland – the Public.en

Andrzej Wajda died at the age of 90 years. The Polish director was hospitalized for several days in a medically induced coma, according to AFP. A source close to the family indicated that the cause of death was lung failure.

Dean of the cinema of that country, the filmmaker, is the author of movies such as A Generation (1955), to Die like a Man (1957), Iron Man (1981), with which it challenged the communist regime of Poland, aligning with the movement of trade unionist Lech Walesa, the Solidarity, and that earned him the Golden Palm, at Cannes, The Case Danton (1983), or Katyn (2007).

the Son of a schoolteacher and a military officer, saw the father murdered by the soviets in 1940 and joined the resistance in poland to fight against communism. This route would mark his film career.

Wajda, who was known as a tireless story teller of your country wanted, in the first phase, following the example of his father and entering a military school, but was unable to. During the occupation the nazi’s, he began to study painting, continuing studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow after the war’s end. The appeal of the film was stronger and he entered the film school in Lodz. It is said that his first feature-length film, A Generation, about the lives of the young people of Warsaw during the occupation nazi, gave rise to what would be "the Polish school of cinema", writes the AFP.

The first moment of international recognition arrived with Man of Marble (1977), a critique of the communist Poland that Wajda came to be presented in Cannes. The film depicts the story of a young film student from Krakow, Agnieszka – this search to make a documentary about Mateusz Birku, a bricklayer who became a hero worker, and he who has come to be built a statue of marble. Only that, however, without knowing why, Birkut had fallen into disgrace and disappeared from the map for years. The young director will eventually retrace your route until you reach the child of this, Maciej Tomczyk, in the shipyards of Gdansk, where they live moments of agitation. Is Maciej who tells him that the father is dead years ago.

Iron Man would be born a few years after and it is in this film that it is clear that Mateusz Birkut was one of the victims of the massacre of December 1970 in Gdansk, in which at least 42 people were killed by the regime’s forces in the Polish when they were protesting against the increase of prices of food products. Wajda returned to Gdansk in 1980, and in 1981 was already to launch this film that follows the story of Maciej.

This done, the journey of the young protagonist is intentionally similar to that of Lech Walesa, the founder of Solidarnosc, or Solidarity, which was born in 1980 and was the first civic movement and trade union freedom in the so called "iron curtain". The very Walesa, who was the first president of Poland following the fall of communism (in 1989), comes to appear in the film.

"I knew that it was necessary to film what was going on down there [in Gdansk]," said once the director, to the microphones of the radio station French RFI. "As soon as I walked in the shipyards, a worker came to sit by my side and said to me: "Lord, Andrzej, you must make a movie about us. Already did The Man of Marble now do Iron Man," said Wajda. "I don’t have habit of making films to order, but if the order is of a worker, yes," said the Polish director.

in Addition to Walesa, also Anna Walentynowicz, another prominent figure of the Solidarity (and one of the casualties of the plane crash that, in 2010, killed 85 people at the crash in Russia, among them the President of poland, Lech Kaczynski) appear in the film.

The communist regime tried to ban its display, but after a petition signed by the workers of Gdansk, the work of Wajda would come finally to the halls of cinema Polish, before obtaining international recognition. In addition to the Palme d’or, the film came to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. He was nominated for the prize on three more occasions, but it was necessary to the american Academy to award him a honorary award to take home a golden statuette. It happened in 2000.