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The Ten Commandments, exact and uncompromising, literally cast in stone, continues to provide a source of moral conflict in contemporary society. In the ten part collection of films, The Decalogue, Krzysztof Kieślowski examines the dilemma of fundamental sin in the lives of ordinary Warsaw citizens.
A young academy soldier, Maciek Chelmicki, is ordered to shoot the secretary of the KW PPR. A coincidence causes him to kill someone else. Meeting face to face with his victim, he gets a shock. He faces the necessity of repeating the assassination. He meets Krystyna, a girl working as a barmaid in the restaurant of the "Monopol" hotel. His affection for her makes him even more aware of the senselessness of killing at the end of the war. Loyalty to the oath he took, and thus the obligation to obey the order, tips the scales.
Doctor Ewa Lipska, an attractive young woman just after graduation, with interesting professional prospects for the future, chooses the job of a village doctor. Brought up in a big city, she settles in the small town of Międzybórz in the Łódź Province. She is forced not only to overcome the daily difficulties resulting from medical practice in a rural health center, but also to learn to talk to people of a different mentality and gain the trust of her patients.
A drama series about young people on the threshold of maturity. The heroes are young people who have recently graduated from high school. Before them, the first life decisions await, the first "adult" love, as well as the first disappointments and dramas.
Two strangers, Jerzy and Marta, accidentally end up holding tickets for the same sleeping chamber on an overnight train to the Baltic Sea coast. Also on board is Marta's spurned lover, who will not leave her alone. When the police enter the train in search of a murderer on the lam, rumors fly and everything seems to point toward one of the main characters as the culprit.
Told as a film within the film, the story concerns an aging actress. Ewa is a flamboyant, pushy actress whose career and love life have come to a dead end. She lives in a faceless housing development. She is totally engrossed in herself and dreams of making a comeback as a singer. But her overbearing personality time after time sets her into conflict with those she tries to work with in the theater and her bedroom.
Ewa is a young ambitious engineer who starts to work for the team of an acclaimed architect Jerzy. Gradually she becomes aware of the bizarre relations he has with his wife and lovers.
Władysław is declared a hero after controlling panic in a bank archive fire.
Poland under Stalinist rule, 1953. A young nun Anna is brought to a prison where an influential priest is kept in. She discovers the priest is the man she loved a few years before. Communist authorities try to make her spy on him now.
In 1969 a young writer decides to write an essay on a well known Polish writer, who had to leave the country in the 50's, later living, working and dying in exile. He slowly assembles the character and even the exterior appearances of his idol until his own identity tragically disappears.
On the island of Saint Helena, a prisoner Napoleon resisted allies who, through the voice of the English governor, Hudson Lowe, tried to humiliate him, break him, poison him in the figurative sense of the word, and perhaps literally.
Set before the first World War in part of Poland under Austrian occupation, the story of a young boy in primary school who later grows up to become a rebellious, poetic-minded teen in the same school when the national movement toward liberation is under way. The story of a country where church and state work together to suppress the human spirit.
Young Pharaoh Ramses XIII clashes with Egypt's clergy over influence on the affairs of the state and its coffers. inexperienced, but quite ambitious pharaoh is putting up a fight against a powerful clan of priests usurping rule over the country.
Krzysztof, a semantics professor and computer hobbyist, is raising his young son, Paweł, to look to science for answers, while Irena, Paweł’s aunt, lives a life rooted in faith. Over the course of one day, both adults are forced to question their belief systems.
A young doctor is tired of being sought by women. One night he meets a young girl who all but forces herself into his room where they talk of morals and love.
In 1807, Napoleon meets and falls in love with 22-year-old Polish countess Marie Walewska, who is unhappily married to a much older man. Enchanted by the blonde, blue-eyed countess, the emperor enters into an affair with Marie, who uses the relationship to induce Napoleon to treat Poland fairly.
Further fate of Dzidzius Górkiewicz, the protagonist of Andrzej Munk's film "Eroica". After retiring, Górkiewicz moved to a small town near Warsaw. After years filled with doing numerous, not always clean businesses, he leads a quiet, honest life of a provincial. A group of local businessmen see him as an ideal candidate for the new mayor. Gorkiewicz himself is undecided about what to do. Then he dreams of a meeting of the municipal council, where he wants to present his program.
1944. Communist militiaman take a post in a little town in the east of Poland. He has to stand against his own men that are not happy with new authorities.
Hanka Ordonówna is a star of pre-war Polish cabarets. The film begins in 1942 in the Middle East, in a British military camp located near the front line. Hanka runs a shelter for homeless Polish children. In her moments of respite, the singer, who is suffering from tuberculosis, recalls the various stages of her career.
Coming of age story of four girls living in the same poor district of Warsaw just before the outbreak of World War One.
