ZAMEK Culture Centre

WAJDA: re-visions 

A poetic meditation on the trauma of camp survivors, a haunting study of shattered psyches and love irreversibly marked by the experience of death.
An appendix to the Polish Film School. A belated return by Andrzej Wajda to the subject of World War II which shifts the focus to the trauma left by a recent catastrophe—wounds that refuse to heal. In a former concentration camp liberated by the American army, now transformed into a displaced persons camp, we meet a small group of Poles trying to relearn the rhythms of normal life after years of imprisonment. Tadeusz, played by Daniel Olbrychski and modeled on the writer Tadeusz Borowski, refuses to take off his camp uniform, wanders among the barracks repurposed by the Americans, and meets Nina, a beautiful Jewish woman (the screen debut of Stanisława Celińska). The mark of death prevents the characters from living and loving, haunting them relentlessly and leading toward an unavoidable tragedy.
Landscape After the Battle is one of Wajda’s most bitter films—a further variation on his recurring story of people who survived the hell of war yet remain unable, in peacetime, to rid themselves of trauma, fear, and a sense of existential defeat. The characters seem to belong more to death than to life, drifting among the living like ghosts. They long for love, but even when it briefly becomes possible, a cruel fate thwarts the fulfilment of their hopes.

Language version: polish with english subtitles
LANDSCAPE AFTER THE BATTLE, dir. Andrzej Wajda, Poland 1970, 101'

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Screening room: Screening Room 1 - Cinema Hall (Kinowa)

Tickets: 22 (regular), 19 (reduced), 17 (with Karta Kinomana) zł