Man of Marble

A film set in Poland. Agnieszka is finishing film school and will make her diploma film. Her subject is a bricklayer who became famous in the 1950s: Birkut, said to have laid thousands of bricks in a day, held up by the state as a model worker. Then the man disappeared. Nobody will say what happened. Agnieszka starts investigating. She finds his statue in a museum, watches the propaganda films in the archive, tracks down the director who made them, and looks for his old friend, his wife and the officials of the period. From there the film runs in two layers: the investigation now, and the past inside the archive footage. The production made those propaganda films itself, shot in the language of the time. What the narrative is interested in is not one man's life but how an official story is built and then erased: the same man is first a hero, then nobody. Agnieszka's own film meets the same pressure; the studio withdraws support and her work is stopped. It could only be made after a long struggle with censorship in Poland, and drew great attention on release; in later years it was spoken of alongside the opposition movement in the country. Krystyna Janda plays Agnieszka and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz plays Birkut. Andrzej Wajda directed. A sequel followed. Who it is for: anyone who likes political cinema and narratives built on archives. Who it is not for: anyone looking for something short; it runs over two and a half hours and asks that you know the political background.