APFF guest, Janusz Zaorski, presents at the University of Texas at Austin on Monday, October 17 at 4pm

“Generations” (Pokolenia) is a full-length docudrama made for the anniversary of the renowned Feature Film Studio in Wroclaw, Poland (Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych we Wrocławiu). It is a story of contemporary Poland told using fragments of works created at the studio. Out of the 450 titles made in Wrocław, Zaorski chose almost fifty. Their fragments, starting with Oscar lifetime achievement award winner Andrzej Wajda’s film “A Generation” (Pokolenie), through the films by Sylwester Chęciński, Wojciech Jerzy Has, Kazimierz Kutz, Roman Polański, Agnieszka Holland, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Wojciech Marczewski, Krzysztof Zanussi and many others, form a story about Poles starting from Nazi occupation through the elections of 1989. They include the period of Stalinist terror, “our little stabilization”, March 1968, unfulfilled expectations of the Gierek era, when martial law was enacted in 1981, and the roundtable negotiations of 1989. The film's narrator is renowned Polish actor from the 1950s, Zbyszek Cybulski, who guides us around the contemporary flim studio and city of Wroclaw.

The director, Janusz Zaorski, will introduce the film and answer questions after. Janusz Zaorski is a Polish film director, scenarist and actor, representative of the "cinema of moral concern" movement (kino moralnego .