Film Forum

Powidoki
Poland, 2016
Directed by Andrzej Wajda
Starring Bogusław Linda
Approx. 98 mins. 4K restoration. 

Released the year that he died at 90, Wajda’s AFTERIMAGE is the perfect coda to a career devoted to depicting the struggle between repressive governments and the free individual. Based on the life of avant-garde painter Wladysław Strzeminski, who was a target of post-War Stalinist forces, which banned abstract art in favor of state-sponsored Socialist Realism, AFTERIMAGE is a classically made drama with a commanding performance by long-time Wajda actor Bogusław Linda as the artist. Of his compulsion to make a film about Strzemiński, Wajda said, “It’s good to see what happens when art is supervised, controlled, influenced by authority and censorship.”

Presented with support from The Ashes and Diamonds Fund for Eastern European Film, The Helen Frankenthaler Endowed Fund for Films on Art, and The Roy Lichtenstein Fund

Reviews

“This is an angry, vivid, passionate film. Cinema is worse off now that Wajda, one of the truly towering greats of the form, is dead; there is some consolation, though, that he went out with his boots still most defiantly on.”
– Glenn Kenny, The New York Times

“Wajda brings such a controlled fervor to this portrait because it’s clear that, like Strzemiński, he identifies as a dissident in dangerous times.”
– Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor