Man of Iron DVD – Marian Opania, Irena Byrska 

Frequently regarded as one of the greatest and most important films to ever come out of Poland the Oscar nominated and Palm d’or winning Man Of Iron (Czlowiek z Zelaza) is legendary director’s Andrezj Wajda’s final and most moving and poignant film regarding the Solidarity Movement and its struggles to gain recognition in his native country. Continuing from his seminal Man Of Marble Man Of Iron expands on the story of Maciej Tomczyk a young worker involved in the anti-Communist labour movement. In Warsaw in 1980 the Regime sends Winkel a weak alcoholic TV hack to Gdansk to dig up dirt on the shipyard strikes particularly on Maciek who has become an inspirational figure in the Union movement following the killing of his father in the December 1970 protests. Posing as a sympathiser to the cause Winkel interviews people who know Tomczyk including his detained wife in an effort to undermine and destroy the growing support behind the movement. The film uses actual news footage of the 1968 and 1970 protests and of the later birth of free unions and Solidarity which it interweaves throughout the stories of a son coming to terms with his father a couple falling in love a reporter searching for courage and a nation undergoing historic if all too fleeting change.