Border Street

As directed by Aleksander Ford in 1952, this Polish-language period drama chronicles the life, times and accomplishments of revered Warsaw-born Romantic composer Frederic Chopin, here played by Czeslaw Wollejko (Danton). The feature focuses exclusively on the youth of Chopin (who died at age 39), spanning his 15th year (c. 1825) through his 21st year (c. 1831); it also depicts Chopin as both prodigiously gifted and one filled with a tremendous spirit of Polish nationalism. Ford concludes with the onset of the illness that eventually killed Ford, set against the backdrop of the famous November Uprising in 1830.

The story of the life of a political prisoner in a Russian gulag. Based on the book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A tale of a young impoverished nobleman, who with his uncle returns from a war against the order of the Teutonic Knights in Lithuania. He falls in love with a beautiful woman and pledges an oath to bring her "three trophies" from the Teutonic Knights.

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Freed Polish soldiers are trapped in a small town in Germany during the last days of World War II. After a doctor's daughter is raped by a concentration camp worker, the Poles allow her and her father to stay in the house that is their temporary quarters. While waiting to be repatriated, the war-weary group is forced to fight some German soldiers who invade the town. The war brings out conflicting emotions of the Poles who find themselves trapped in the house and once again under fire from the enemy.

Movie filmed directly after the liberation of the concentration camp at Majdanek.

Jozek unexpectedly is put to a harsh test when his mother, a seamstress by profession, succumbs to an unfortunate accident and is forced to lie in bed for several long months. The boy stays alone, has nothing to live on, and finally lands on the pavement. On the advice of a friend, he enters the "legion of the street", making him one of the many juvenile newspapers. It turns out that the boy's mother is waiting for a hard operation, and its costs can be covered only one way - the boy must be a "master", that is, he has to deliver newspapers. A bicycle is necessary for this. Meanwhile, the opportunity arises to get a bike - a street cycling race is organized, and the main prize is the bike. Józek decides to take off.

Polish writer/director Aleksander Ford's Eighth Day of the Week takes an astonishing anti-Communist stance--the first of many that would compel Ford to leave his homeland after a general governmental crackdown on personal expression in 1968. Zbigniew Cybulski and Sonja Ziemann play a married couple who fall through the cracks of Red bureaucracy in Warsaw. The film does not endeavor to preach, merely to present a matter-of-fact glance at how little the individual matters when confronted with mountains of red tape. Upon its completion in 1958, the government refused to allow Eighth Day of the Week to be shown in Poland; it would not been seen anywhere until its European release one year later.

One of the few surviving documentaries about Jewish life in Poland before World War II, this film was produced to raise funds for the Vladimir Medem Sanitarium which stood as the embodiment of health and enlightenment, in striking contrast to the grim images of urban Polish-Jewish poverty.