Man of Iron [1981]

 Andrzej Wajda stumbled upon the idea for Man of Iron – the remarkable sequel to Man of Marble, thus concluding his ‘Solidarity Films’ diptych – when a worker at the Lenin Gdańsk Shipyard, the birthplace of the Polish ‘Solidarity’ trade union movement in 1980, asked him to make a film about them. Leveraging a brief thaw in censorships – it would subsequently be banned and forced the filmmaker into exile – Wajda painted a simultaneously vivid, thrilling and solemn picture of the movement’s genesis through the life of Tomczyk (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), the son of the previous film’s protagonist Birkut (Radziwiłowicz). Modelled on Lech Wałęsa, Tomczyk was a former student activist and a worker at the shipyard who – upon his father’s death during the December 1970 protests and his dismissal from the job later – plays a leading role in the 1980 shipyard strike that founded the Solidarity movement. Like Birkut, his story of his life is also constructed through multiple perspectives – in particular, his old college friend (Bogusław Linda), and Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda), who left filmmaking for political activism upon marrying Tomczyk – but this time by Winkel (Marian Opania), a once radical radio journalist who’s now an alcoholic and a lackey for the authorities. He’s ordered to dig out compromising information about the firebrand leader, for slandering his reputation, but starts regaining his lost dissidence as he learns more about the man’s defiant political journey. Rippling with apitprop, insolence, vitality and a throbbing zeitgeist, the gripping political mosaic unfolded through alternations of a framing narrative, multiple flashbacks and archival footage, and comprised of two haunting protest songs, viz. the elegiac unofficial anthem of the striking workers and a furious ballad performed by Janda herself.

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Docu Drama/Film a Clef

Language: Polish

Country: Poland