Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
Touched with the fire and rebellion of a new generation of Polish film makers
Genre : Drama, Romance, War
Runtime : 1H 43M
Director : Andrzej Wajda
Writer : Jerzy Andrzejewski, Andrzej Wajda
Synopsis
A 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.
Stach is a wayward teen living in squalor on the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Guided by an avuncular Communist organizer, he is introduced to the underground resistance—and to the beautiful Dorota. Soon he is engaged in dangerous efforts to fight oppression and indignity, maturing as he assumes responsibility for others’ lives. A coming-of-age story of survival and shattering loss, A Generation delivers a brutal portrait of the human cost of war.
In the post-war Gion district of Kyoto, the geisha Miyoharu agrees to apprentice the 16 year-old Eiko, whose mother was a former geisha who had just died. After a year of training they have to find a large sum of money before Eiko can debut. Miyoharu borrows the money from the tea-house owner, Okimi, who in turn obtains the money from the businessman Kusuda. Kusuda fancies Eiko himself and wants to give Miyoharu to Kanzaki in order to close a large business deal. However both geishas have minds of their own and, going against tradition, want to be able to say no to clients.
This movie has any coherent plot. It is more the portrait of the lives of different people in the hard years of post-war in Spain (the 40's), and how people manage to survive in a country desolated by the war. Like other films: la colmena or roma (fellini) it shows us lots of characters and some moments of their lives.
Set against the turbulent backdrop of London in the 1940s, this adaptation of Sarah Waters' bestselling novel, The Night Watch, follows four young Londoners inextricably linked by their wartime experiences. In a time when the barriers of sexual morality and social convention have been broken down, Kay, Helen, Viv and Duncan enjoy a freedom never experienced before. Moving back in time through the 1940s into the maelstrom of the Blitz, the lives, loves and losses of these four central characters are unravelled. For them, the post-war victory is bittersweet, for it returns them to the margins of society, from which they hoped they had been liberated. In order to build their future they must each make peace with their past.
Two brothers—Chul-ho, an accountant with a toothache and a pregnant wife, and Yong-ho, an unemployed ex-soldier wounded in battle—navigate life in post-war Korea.
Finished the Spanish Civil War in April 1939, in November 1940, while Spain is being crushed by the ruthless boot of dictator Franco, Pepita travels from rural Huelva to Madrid to be near her sister Hortensia, who is seven months pregnant and imprisoned, haunted by the shadow of a death sentence.
Freddie, a volatile, heavy-drinking veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, finds some semblance of a family when he stumbles onto the ship of Lancaster Dodd, the charismatic leader of a new "religion" he forms after World War II.
In 1931, budding author Christopher Isherwood goes to Berlin at the invitation of his friend W. H. Auden for the gay sex that abounds in the city. He falls for street sweeper Heinz, paying medical bills for the boy's sickly mother, to the disapproval of her other son, Nazi Gerhardt.
Paris, during the winter after its Liberation: Jean Diego meets up with his friend Raymond Lecuyer again. A tramp predicts Jean will meet the most beautiful girl in the world, and that same evening Jean meets Malou. But he soon discovers that her brother Guy was the one that gave his friend Raymond away to the Gestapo...
An American writer moves to Paris to be closer to his daughter and finds himself falling immediately on hard times.
Two baby squirrels ask grandpa to explain what "men" are when he comes in singing "peace on earth, goodwill to men". Grandpa tells the story of man's last war. This classic animation short was an Academy Award Best Short Subject, Cartoons nominee.
Following World War II in peacetime Scotland, brigade headquarters replaces commanding officer Major Jock Sinclair, a boisterous battalion leader, with the strict, temperamental Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow. Resentful toward his replacement, Sinclair undermines Barrow's authority and damages his successor's reputation among the soldiers. Barrow faces an uphill battle in regaining the discipline and respect of his battalion.
The title "All My Good Countrymen" is not without irony as this epic tale of Czech village life from shortly after the end of the Second World War concentrates on the activities of a group of friends who are not beyond reproach in siding with a politically corrupt regime for material advancement. Are these the "good countrymen" of the title or does it refer to the rest of the village who scorn these petty authority figure with silent contempt?
The story of 1947, when Bender's band, after a beating of the Nazis, tried to fight their way through Czechoslovakia to Austria. They come out of the forest to occupy the family's rural estate, kidnap doctors to help heal one of their wounded.
In the harsh post-war years' Catalan countryside, Andreu, a child that belongs to the losing side, finds the corpses of a man and his son in the forest. The authorities want his father to be made responsible of the deaths, but Andreu tries to help his father by finding out who truly killed them. In this search, Andreu develops a moral consciousness against a world of adults fed by lies. In order to survive, he betrays his own roots and ends up finding out the monster that lives within him.
In the summer of 1947, Britain prepares to commemorate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Phillip. To get around food-rationing laws, Dr. Charles Swaby, accountant Henry Allardyce and solicitor Frank Lockwood are fattening a black-market pig for the big day. Egged on by his wife, meek Gilbert Chilvers steals the swine, but the couple must conceal it from inspector Morris Wormold.
At a track near Rome, shoeshine boys are watching horses run. Two of the boys Pasquale, an orphan, and Giuseppe, his younger friend are riding. The pair have been saving to buy a horse of their own to ride...
At the close of the war in Japan, a widowed mother makes every possible sacrifice to bring up her ungrateful son and daughter who are unimpressed with their poor standard of living at home. They gradually reject her in search of the material comforts that working as a maid cannot provide. The mother's despair becomes interminable.
The wife of a British Judge is caught in a self-destructive love affair with a Royal Air Force pilot.
Millionaire Victor Danemore, living on the French Riviera, dies suddenly of a heart attack. His secretary, Dave Bishop, wants to know more about his employer's life. Surprisingly, not even his young wife knows anything about her husband's background or how he earned his fortune. Clues lead Bishop to Vienna and Stockholm, where he learns that Danemore was blackmailing people who cooperated with the Nazis during World War II.
Notorious shootist and womanizer Quirt Evans' horse collapses as he passes a Quaker family's home. Quirt has been wounded, and the kindly family takes him in to nurse him back to health against the advice of others. The handsome Evans quickly attracts the affections of their beautiful daughter, Penelope. He develops an affection for the family and their faith, but his troubled past follows him.
Tells two tales set during WWII: A seemingly feckless and selfish finally takes up arms in the national struggle against the Nazis. Set in a POW camp, Polish inmates cling to their hopes for an eventual escape, encouraged by the legendary escape of one of their own.
A priest is sent to a small parish in the Polish countryside which is believed to be under demonic possession and there he finds his own temptations awaiting.
Two scientists are chosen as guinea pigs for a time experiment: they are placed in hibernation and should be brought back to life after three years. In the meantime, however, World War III breaks out and life has been wiped off the surface of Earth. When they wake up, it turns out that not only 50 years have passed but also that they are the only living specimens of the male sex in a new, underground society composed exclusively of women.
Set at the turn of the century, the story concerns a Polish poet living in Cracow who has decided to marry a peasant girl. The wedding is attended by a heterogenous group of people from all strata of Polish society, who dance, get drunk and lament Poland's 100-year-long division under Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The bridegroom, a painter friend, and a journalist each in turn is confronted with spectres of Polish past. In the end a call to arms is called but turns out to be a hoax.
Two strangers, Jerzy and Marta, accidentally end up holding tickets for the same sleeping chamber on an overnight train to the Baltic Sea coast. Also on board is Marta's spurned lover, who will not leave her alone. When the police enter the train in search of a murderer on the lam, rumors fly and everything seems to point toward one of the main characters as the culprit.
A young doctor is tired of being sought by women. One night he meets a young girl who all but forces herself into his room where they talk of morals and love. But he loses her when he goes out to see some friends and then rushes madly around the city after her.
The wicked Blue Meanies take over Pepperland, eliminating all color and music. As the only survivor, the Lord Admiral escapes in the yellow submarine and journeys to Liverpool to enlist the help of the Beatles.
Dan Evans, a small time farmer, is hired to escort Ben Wade, a dangerous outlaw, to Yuma. As Evans and Wade wait for the 3:10 train to Yuma, Wade's gang is racing to free him.
Will Lockhart arrives in Coronado, an isolated town in New Mexico, in search of someone who sells rifles to the Apache tribe, finding himself unwillingly drawn into the convoluted life of a local ranching family whose members seem to have a lot to hide.
The legendary true story of a small band of soldiers who sacrificed their lives in hopeless combat against a massive army in order to prevent a tyrant from smashing the new Republic of Texas.
A budding playwright is thrilled to find out that his play will be performed at a prestigious theater, but a series of problems pile up, along with the general feeling that opening night will be disastrous.
Kazmierz Dziewanowicz's hobby is very strange. He collects people who were born on the 29th of February. One day he sees that in his collection there are two men with the same name, the same birth place, the same date of birth and the same parents. In the middle of the night somebody kills him. The Intelligence Agency begins investigation.
"In 1960 Kazimierz Kutz' second film NIKT NIE WOLA / NOBODY'S CALLING, based on a Jozef Hen novel that was never published in Poland, described the fate of Poles on the Eastern Front. Kutz used the film to explore new formal solutions, collaborating closely with cinematographer Jerzy Wojcik to reveal the psychological landscape of a pair of lovers who are strongly affected by wartime events. The camera recorded the couple's inner experiences, contrasting their muted intimacy against the surrounding scenery of a ruined town. The film did not win over critics at the time of its release. It was not until later that critics recognized Kutz's effort to experiment with aesthetics in a manner akin to that pursued by filmmakers of the new wave. NOBODY'S CALLING came to be compared with Michelangelo Antonioni's THE ADVENTURE, which was produced around the same time."
Polish musical comedy. The film focuses on two friends who spend their vacation in the beautiful countryside of Mazury. They buy a very nice car (Syrenka), but in order to pay for it the men need to start working as solicitors for a notable art impresario named Koszajtis. Soon they get thrown right in the middle of a hilarious war between two rivaling music-and-dance groups.
A man jumps off a moving train and goes to a small town to face its inhabitants, who seem familiar, but odd.
Three short segments about love.
The story of Felek, a cab driver, who, thanks to his accidental fortune, enters the distinguished world of high society.