The Conductor

A violinist in a provincial Polish orchestra meets a world-famous conductor while on a scholarship in the United States. The conductor was once in love with her mother. He returns to Poland, to the town he came from, to take charge of the provincial orchestra and prepare Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with them, and at the same time tries to revive that old attachment with the daughter standing in for the mother. Her husband, who runs the orchestra, resents the man for personal and professional reasons at once. In Andrzej Wajda’s film John Gielgud plays the conductor, Krystyna Janda the violinist and Andrzej Seweryn her husband, and Seweryn won the Silver Bear for best actor at the Berlinale in 1980 for it.