WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s leading filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, whose career maneuvering between a repressive communist government and an audience yearning for freedom won him international recognition and an honorary Oscar, has died. He was 90.
Wajda had recently been hospitalized and died Sunday night, according to his colleague, film director Jacek Bromski.
Wajda’s last movie “Afterimage,” a biopic about an avant-garde artist, was recently chosen as Poland’s official entry for the 2016 Oscar for best foreign language film.
In 2000, Wajda received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. Four of his films, including “Man of Iron” and “Katyn,” were nominated for Oscars.
“Wajda has brought some small measure of rest to their names, to Poland, and to history,” the Sun-Times’ late movie critic Roger Ebert wrote in 2009 of “Katyn,” which depicted the 1940 slaughter of some 15,000 officers of the Polish army by the Russian KGB.
The director trod on ground controlled by communist-era censors with “Man of Marble,” which looked at the roots of worker discontent in communist Poland in the 1950s, and “Man of Iron” on the rise of the Solidarity movement.
