A Generation

A film set in a working-class district of occupied Warsaw. Stach is seventeen. He steals coal, hangs about the streets, and the war is still just news to him. One day they attack a train. A German guard opens fire and his friend is killed. Stach takes a place at a carpentry workshop. He works as an apprentice, learns the trade from his master, and learns something else there too. There is an organisation in the workshop. Sekula explains it to him slowly, starting from wages, labour and who works for whom. Then Dorota appears. She is in the resistance and Stach falls in love with her. From there the film is a story of joining. A first meeting, a first weapon, a first task and a first death. The ghetto is at a distance. The uprising begins behind the wall and the group tries to help from outside; smoke is seen across Warsaw. What the narrative is interested in is not heroism but the end of childhood: the young go in without quite knowing what they are doing and the price is paid at once. Jasio's line is the hardest part. A boy is cornered on a staircase, and that scene sets the feeling of everything left in the film. The form is realist but not entirely. The narrative carries in places a tone that suits the official cinema of the period; it was made under censorship and some sections show it. This is Andrzej Wajda's first feature and the beginning of the trilogy he built around the war. The young Roman Polanski and Zbigniew Cybulski appear in small parts; both later moved to the centre of Polish cinema. Tadeusz Łomnicki, Urszula Modrzyńska and Tadeusz Janczar are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes Polish cinema and postwar European realism. Who it is not for: anyone expecting an independent view; the film keeps to the political line of the period and ignores one wing of the resistance.