Man of Iron

Andrzej Wajda’s rousing sequel to Man of Marble represents the most successful merger of arts and politics in Polish history — as well as Poland’s only Palme d’Or winner thus far. While that film was a fearless inquiry into the past of the Stalinist 1950s, Man of Iron is fully immersed in the present, as it not only chronicles, but also partly documents the Gdańsk shipyard strikes of 1980, which brought significant success for the emerging Solidarity movement. Only partially focused on Maciej Birkut, the son of Mateusz of the first film (both played by the brilliant Jerzy Radziwiłłowicz), Man of Iron instead portrays a bitter journalist (Marian Opania), as he navigates the political orders of his superiors and the remains of his own conscience. The film remains an exemplar of white-hot political filmmaking — and one that played at Cannes 1981 against another main competition entry designed as a Cold War parable… namely, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession.