Stach is a wayward teen living in squalor on the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Guided by an avuncular Communist organizer, he is introduced to the underground resistance—and to the beautiful Dorota. Soon he is engaged in dangerous efforts to fight oppression and indignity, maturing as he assumes responsibility for others’ lives. A coming-of-age story of survival and shattering loss, A Generation delivers a brutal portrait of the human cost of war. —The Criterion Collection
A major figure in the world of post-World War II Eastern European cinema, Polish director Andrzej Wajda has chronicled his country’s political and social evolution with sensitivity, fervor, and a refusal to make compromises in dealing with his difficult subjects. The son of a Polish cavalry officer who was killed early in World War II, Wajda fought in the Resistance movement against the Nazis when he was still a teenager. After the war, he studied to be a painter before entering the Lodz film school. On the heels of his apprenticeship to director Aleksander Ford, Wajda was given the opportunity to direct a film on his own. With A Generation (1955), the first-time director poured out all his bitterness and disillusionment regarding blind patriotism and wartime heroics, using as his alter ego a young, James Dean-style antihero played by Zbigniew Cybulski. The Wajda/Cybulski team went on to make two more films of escalating brilliance, which further developed the antiwar theme of A Generation… read more
Brilliant film. It follows a young Polish hoodlum, Stach, as he progresses from an apolitical, delinquent existance to becoming a hardened leader in the communist Polish resistance against the Nazis… read review