2026 marks the centenary of Andrzej Wajda’s birth, and the 24th KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival celebrates the occasion with a retrospective spanning six decades of the iconic Polish director’s career. For anyone interested in film history, retrospectives are often one of the best ways into a major filmmaker’s body of work, especially when that filmmaker’s films are not regularly shown in repertory cinemas or film institutes. They also offer the rare chance to encounter less frequently discussed works, films that complicate the neat critical image built around a canonical director.

The touring programme at Edinburgh Filmhouse presents Wajda not only as the grand political filmmaker of Polish cinema, but also as an artist whose work moved between war memory, social critique, intimate drama and modern urban alienation. This is especially valuable because Wajda is still most commonly remembered through his overtly political films, particularly Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1977) and its sequel Man of Iron (Człowiek z żelaza, 1981), the latter of which won the Palme d’Or. Yet the retrospective also reveals a less familiar side of his filmmaking: lighter, more elusive, and at times surprisingly close to the rhythms of European modernist cinema.

Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni czarodzieje, 1960) belongs to the period immediately after Wajda’s war trilogy. Compared with A Generation (1955), Kanal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), it appears almost weightless. Instead of resistance fighters, ruins and historical trauma, the film follows a one night encounter between Bazyli, a young doctor and jazz drummer played by Tadeusz Łomnicki, and Pelagia, a mysterious young woman played by Krystyna Stypułkowska. Their conversation drifts through flirtation, role play, social norms and emotional self defence. The film captures a generation no longer defined by wartime heroism, but not yet able to believe in any new collective ideal.

Stylistically, Innocent Sorcerers carries echoes of the French New Wave: its looseness, its interest in youth culture, its jazz inflected rhythms, and its fascination with a single night in the city. Yet it is not simply a Polish imitation of Western modernity. Its apparent lightness is shaped by the conditions of postwar socialist Poland, where cinema remained tied to state institutions and where cultural freedom was always partial. The film’s apolitical tone is therefore itself historically revealing. It shows Wajda responding not to heroic history, but to a less healthy contemporary life: urban, sleepless, charming, evasive and emotionally exhausted. Its lovers play a game that is both about love and not about love. Its city feels awake and asleep at the same time.

This makes Innocent Sorcerers a fascinating outlier within Wajda’s filmography, especially when viewed through the lens of auteur theory. Auteur theory has been one of the most influential ideas in film history. It helped establish cinema as an art form and placed the director at the centre of film culture. For many art house filmmakers, especially those working outside Hollywood, the recognition of a distinct artistic signature has allowed their work to circulate internationally and to be appreciated as serious art. Film festivals, above all Cannes, have played a central role in this process, turning the auteur into one of the key figures of global film culture.

Yet there is also a cost to this system. The very idea of the auteur can become restrictive, especially for filmmakers outside Western Europe and North America. Their films are often expected to fit an existing critical image or a perception of the imagination of the society, often full of eco-social issues, to represent a national reality, or to display an unmistakable cultural or political identity. The personal stamp that allows them to be recognised can also become a burden. They are asked to be singular, representative and legible all at once. This expectation does not always apply in the same way to their Western counterparts, whose formal experiments or lighter works are more easily accepted as part of artistic freedom at the top stage of film festival conversations .

Wajda is a particularly interesting case because his global reputation is deeply tied to political history. Man of Marble and Man of Iron focus on the fate of workers within socialist Poland, but they do so in different historical moments. Man of Marble investigates how the socialist state manufactured and discarded the image of the worker hero, while Man of Iron moves closer to the living political reality of the Solidarity movement. In these films, Wajda moves away from the heightened expressionist imagery associated with some of his earlier work and turns towards a more documentary influenced mode. Fictional narrative, archival material, interviews and historical documents are brought together to challenge the authority of official history.

This shift also connects Wajda to the broader atmosphere of the Cinema of moral anxiety (Kino moralnego niepokoju), with its concern for ordinary people caught between private conscience and public pressure. In Man of Marble and Man of Iron, film and journalism become mechanisms of witness. They do not simply record history after the event; they intervene in the struggle over how history is seen, remembered and narrated. Man of Iron in particular is not only an artwork about a social movement. It also becomes part of that movement’s moral and civic imagination.

One of the few films made between these two films, however, is The Maids of Wilko (Panny z Wilka, 1979), a work that seems to belong to another register altogether. Adapted from a popular short story by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, the film has the quality of a period drama, yet its emotional force lies less in plot than in atmosphere. A man returns to a house associated with his youth and encounters the women he once knew. What unfolds is a meditation on time, regret and the impossibility of return.

In this sense, The Maids of Wilko recalls the stories by Chekhov more than Wajda’s signature political cinema. Its stillness, its rooms, its pauses and its melancholy attention to missed lives bring to mind plays such as Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. Like Chekhov’s fading Russian gentry, Wajda’s characters seem suspended at the end of a world. Polish landed culture and Russian landowning culture were not identical, but both can be read as forms of Eastern European aristocratic civilisation facing the pressures of modernity, revolution and historical displacement. What The Maids of Wilko captures is the final lyricism of a class and a way of life already passing into memory.

Seen alongside Innocent Sorcerers, Man of Marble, Man of Iron and The Maids of Wilko, Wajda’s career begins to look less like a single authorial trajectory and more like a field of tensions.Wajda’s cinema cannot be contained by the label of political filmmaking. His work moves between national history and private memory, between workers’ struggles and intimate encounters, between revolutionary moments and the quieter dramas of ageing, regret, lost youth and social performance. The so called outliers in his career are not marginal works. They are the films that expose the limits of the label most often attached to him.

The value of a retrospective lies precisely here. It does not simply confirm the greatness of a canonical director. It can also unsettle the canon’s own habits of recognition. In Wajda’s case, the Edinburgh Filmhouse programme allows us to see how a filmmaker famous for political cinema repeatedly moved beyond the political film as a fixed category. His cinema can be about Poland’s history, but is also allowed about the difficulty of living inside history, whether that history appears as war, socialism, modernity, memory, or the quiet passing of time, a privilege not many can easily afford today.

All films screened as part of Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 2026