Conjuring a claustrophobic vision of post-nuclear Poland, Piotr Szulkin lends his satirical eye to the weaponization of religion as a means of social control. A utilitarian triumph of ramshackle world-building, O-Bi, O-Ba is a hallucinatory examination of apocalyptic anxieties in the atomic age.

Drawing on Jewish legend, this Kafkaesque work of speculative science fiction is the debut feature by one of the great visionaries of the 20th century. From a nightmarish world of gods and monsters, Piotr Szulkin forges a modern Prometheus as a potent allegory for Poland’s Communist experiment.

Pulled from the Cannes competition in the same year that Poland declared martial law, Piotr Szulkin’s tale of alien invasion is a blazing satire of the media machine. Dedicated to H.G. Wells and Orson Welles, this noir-inflected sci-fi is an eerily prescient interrogation of the fake-news era.

Taking inspiration from Pasolini’s La Ricotta, Piotr Szulkin closes his “Apocalyptic Tetralogy” with an anarchic riff on the Passion of Christ. The funniest of the four films, Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes is a rich sci-fi allegory that puts the European colonial project in its satirical crosshairs.