Filip buys an 8mm movie camera when his first child is born. Because it's the first camera in town, he's named official photographer by the local Party boss. His horizons widen when he is sent to regional film festivals with his first works but his focus on movie making also leads to domestic strife and philosophical dilemmas.
Tomasz, a doctor, and atheist, is diagnosed with cancer. His ex-wife offers him the money for treatment in Paris, but his lung cancer is past the operating stage. Facing imminent death, he questions the beliefs he has held all his life and starts experimenting with both his own life and those of others.
This heroic story follows the life of Karol Wojtyla, a Polish Roman catholic who ascends the throne of St. Peter as Pope John Paul II. As a young boy, Karol is a bright and talented student. Archbishop Sapieha recognizes the very special, moving qualities Karol possesses and encourages him to consider the priesthood. Although determined to study Polish literature, Karol turns to the church; he is ordained and studies in Italy, France, and Belgium. Torn by fear and repression in post-Stalin Eastern Europe, Karol becomes a poisonous thorn in the communists' side. His deer reverence and commitment return him to Poland as Pope John Paul II.
In what appears to be an inexplicable incident, a man drives up to a resort hotel in midwinter, throws away his car keys, enters, and proceeds to agitate everyone he meets with his urgency -- a message he is somehow unable to communicate. Then he leaves, disappearing in the snow. Later, the people he appeared to have upset have gathered to search for him and find him frostbitten, but alive. Visiting him at the sanatorium to which he has been taken, they gradually discover what was really happening.
Lasting is an emotional love story about Michał and Karina, a pair of Polish students who meet and fall in love with each other while working summer jobs in Spain. An unexpected nightmare brutally breaks into their carefree time in the heavenly landscape and throws their lives into chaos.
The film evokes a childhood in rural Lithuania between the wars. A country boy, Tomaszek, lives on a rich estate, situated on the Polish border. He realizes that the Issa Valley he lives in is to be torn apart by internal political conflicts and unrests among the mixed population of Poles, Lithuanians, Jews and Russians. He, however, is captivated by a paradise surrounding him, the forest, and his fantasies.
The five participants in the meeting for the construction of a luxury hotel meet years later at its opening.
In this mixture of fiction and documentary Krzysztof Zanussi invites a number of Poland’s great actors—Maja Komorowowska, Daniel Olbrychski, and Jan Nowicki—to "revisit" characters they played in the director's earlier works.
Maidens and Widows is an epic tale of a hundred years of Polish history from the perspective of women, the titular maidens and widows. Set against the backdrop of turbulent historical events.
A young man is confronted with corrupt and vindictive colleagues at work and negligent officials at the hospital where his mother is dying. As he searches quixotically for a steadfast moral code by which to live, he suffers from the knowledge of human frailty and our darker inclinations to do harm.
A young woman, Anna, is getting ready to make her own movie. After a while, she discovers that she is just a heroine in the movie and nothing really depends on her. Rebellious against the author, she writes her own film, recreating the characters from scratch - but neither do her characters want to be heroes in someone else's film. The story of the heroine is intertwined with the story of a critic who "chased" writers all his life to finally find out that his efforts were pointless.
Lives of three different people living in a small Silesian town intersect.
Difficulty of human relations in a 3-cornered tale: a neurotic woman, idealistic young man and his mother. Tomek is a clean-cut, high-minded geography student. He lives with his mother Zofia, a sensitive, practicing Catholic, like her son. When he meets Julia, a depressed woman older than he, he first tries to comfort her, then invites her to stay with him and his mother. Tomek makes a trip to West Berlin to visit his well-off father. He refuses to take money from him and looks for work as a house painter. Julia ends up in a rest home for treatment, while Tomek is trying to make their relationship work.
An Uruguayan diplomat brings his new wife with him on a business trip to Poland in the summer immediately preceding the outbreak of World War II.
The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.
Following the death of his mother in '80s Poland, 12-year-old Wojciech has taken the brunt of his stressed father's frustrations with him; the boy frequently gets punished via belt. Wojciech's father occasionally tries to, instead, bond with him, but soon snaps back to his short-fused habits. Apart from Wojciech's friend Bartek, no one does anything to help. Jump to present day, Wojciech is a furrow-browed journalist who spends most of his spare time spelunking alone. Just like his father, he has serious anger management issues. Fellow caver Tania feels inexplicably attracted to him, but the love of a good woman may not be enough.
The story of catholic saint Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941), who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.
An examination of the relationship between an indecisive medical student and his fiancee.
The tale about last years of the legendary Home Army commander, General August Emil Fieldorf "Nil".
A young TV producer struggles with his conscience when he becomes convinced that his TV program is covering up a lie, but the more he tries to reveal the truth the more uncertainty he discovers.
1982, Poland. A translator loses her husband and becomes a victim of her own sorrow. She looks to sex, to her son, to law, and to hypnotism when she has nothing else in this time of martial law when Solidarity was banned.
Set in 1952, the story follows events around the "Peace Run", a propaganda 3-day marathon for peace. The winner is to be presented with a new motorcycle by the country's president. Chief organizer is a ruthless manipulator who will stop at nothing to make sure that the right man wins. There are two runners, Budny and Stolar, who are participating in the race for different reasons.
A Security Service Major wishes to "buy" gullible priest Zieja and turn him into an agent who will discredit the opposition. The priest's interrogations become a natural pretext for a journey through the history of Poland in the twentieth century: from the Bolshevik war of 1920, through World War II, up to modern times. It turns out that the seemingly naive Father Zieja is actually a clever rebel.
The life of the pope John-Paul II, from his youth as a writer, actor, and athlete in war-torn occupied Poland to his election as Pope at the age of 58.
In this adaptation of an historical play by Pope John Paul II, painter Albert Chmielowski decides to devote his life to helping the homeless.
In Poland, behind the gates of an exclusive housing estate, the life of its wealthy residents is regulated by an old code of honor, due to which the Kowalskis and the Nowaks have been embroiled in a bloody family feud for years.
Shortly after World War II an American soldier (Norman) and a Polish refugee (Emilia) fall in love. Eventually he will return to the U.S. and both expect that she will soon follow him with her mother. Emilia's mother is sick, but will recover with the right medicine. But the mother, and not Emilia, knows that there will only be one ticket...
A high-ranking Polish politburo member is banished from the party, and must find out why. Set in 1979 Poland before the Solidarity events.
A portrait of cabinet intrigues, the false aspirations of the party elite and the grinding reality of the 1960s, or "our little stability." Robert Meller and Janusz Dymek's documentary drama concerns the famous 1964 meat scandal, in which three death sentences were demanded and one was adjudicated and executed. The victim was Stanislaw Wawrzecki. Ostensibly, it was about fraud and bribes in the meat industry. In fact, it was about covering up the government's economic ineptitude, shortages of supplies and directing the people's anger at a few defendants.