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Ashes and Diamonds
Sign in to save1958 film by Andrzej Wajda
Film · TMDB
7.4A young academy soldier, Maciek Chelmicki, is ordered to shoot the secretary of the KW PPR. A coincidence causes him to kill someone else. Meeting face to face with his victim, he gets a shock. He faces the necessity of repeating the assassination. He meets Krystyna, a girl working as a barmaid in the restaurant of the "Monopol" hotel. His affection for her makes him even more aware of the senselessness of killing at the end of the war. Loyalty to the oath he took, and thus the obligation to obey the order, tips the scales.
Cast
- Zbigniew Cybulski as Maciek Chełmicki
- Ewa Krzyżewska as Krystyna Rozbicka
- Wacław Zastrzeżynski as Szczuka
- Adam Pawlikowski as Andrzej Kossecki
- Bogumił Kobiela as Drewnowski
- Jan Ciecierski as Porter
Themes
- polish resistance
- world war ii
- soviet military
- black and white
- post war
- post world war ii
- post-war poland
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Key facts
- Directed by
- Andrzej Wajda
- Screenplay by
- Jerzy Andrzejewski , Andrzej Wajda
- Based on
- Ashes and Diamonds , 1948 novel, by Jerzy Andrzejewski
- Starring
- Zbigniew Cybulski Ewa Krzyżewska Wacław Zastrzeżyński
- Cinematography
- Jerzy Wójcik
- Edited by
- Halina Nawrocka
- Music by
- Filip Nowak
- Production company
- Zespół realizatorów filmowych „Kadr”
- Distributed by
- Janus Films
- Release date
- 3 October 1958 ( 1958-10-03 )
- Running time
- 103 minutes
- Country
- Poland
- Language
- Polish
via Wikipedia infobox
~24 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Ashes and Diamonds (Polish: Popiół i diament) is a 1958 Polish drama film directed by Andrzej Wajda, based on the 1948 novel by Polish writer Jerzy Andrzejewski. Starring Zbigniew Cybulski and Ewa Krzyżewska, it completed Wajda's war films trilogy, following A Generation (1954) and Kanal (1956). The action of Ashes and Diamonds takes place in 1945, shortly after World War II. The main protagonist of the film, former Home Army soldier Maciek Chełmicki, is acting in the anti-Communist underground. Maciek receives an order to kill Szczuka, the local secretary of the Polish Workers' Party. Over time, Chełmicki increasingly doubts if his task is worth doing.
Ashes and Diamonds, although based on the novel that directly supported the postwar Communist system in Poland, was subtly modified in comparison with the source material. Wajda sympathized with the soldiers of the Polish independence underground; thus, he devoted most of the attention to Chełmicki. During the three-month development of Ashes and Diamonds, the director made drastic changes to the baseline scenario, thanks to his assistant director Janusz Morgenstern, as well as Cybulski, who played the leading role. The film received permission from the authorities to be distributed only through Andrzejewski's intercession. The film did not receive permission to be screened at the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival. However, Ashes and Diamonds appeared at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI award.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Ashes and Diamonds” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.