Martin Scorsese Set for NYPFF's Opening Night Gala Tribute to Andrzej Wajda

The 13th Annual New York Polish Film Festival, running May 2-7, 2017, has announced its opening night lineup at The Directors Guild of America.

Tuesday, May 2

Opening Night Gala with Tribute to Andrzej Wajda

7pm AFTERIMAGE (POWIDOKI) Directed by Andrzej Wajda

*Introduction by Martin Scorsese

The Directors Guild of America is located at 110 W. 57th St, New York, NY. For more information and advance tickets, visit www.nypff.com.

AFTERIMAGE (POWIDOKI) 2016. 98 minutes. Directed by Andrzej Wajda.

For more than half a century, Wajda crafted a filmography that encapsulated the essence of postwar Poland and constitutes, quite simply, one of the great legacies of world cinema. His last film is a biopic about avant-garde artist Wadysaw Strzemiski, who battled Stalinist orthodoxy and his own physical impairments to advance his progressive ideas about art. For more than half a century, Wajda crafted a filmography that encapsulated the essence of postwar Poland and constitutes, quite simply, one of the great legacies of world cinema. His last film is a biopic about avant-garde artist Wadysaw Strzemiski, who battled Stalinist orthodoxy and his own physical impairments to advance his progressive ideas about art. Set in post-war Poland, AFTERIMAGE looks at the life of renowned painter Wadysaw Strzemiski (brilliantly played by Polish superstar Boguslaw Linda). Strzemiski, who worked as a professor at the National School of Fine Arts in was a great artist and co-creator of the theory of Unism. Famous before the Second World War, his students treated him like the "messiah of modern painting," but university authorities and the Ministry of Culture had a very different opinion. Unlike artists loyal to the doctrines of socialist realism and fulfilling Party tasks, Strzemiski did not compromise his art. He refused to comply with Party regulations, and he was eventually expelled from the university and the artists' union. Strzemiski's students continued to support him, visiting him for private lectures, penning his Theory of Vision, and listening to his critique of their work. But jobless Strzemiski, impaired due to a missing arm and leg, soon fell into poverty and poor health as the Communist authorities remain persistent in their actions to ruin him.