AVAILABLE FOR SHIPPING ON OCTOBER 1, 2011
The Masterpieces of Polish Cinema
Aleksander Ford (3-DVD set)
Studio: TiM Film Studio
Number of disks: 4
Condition: Brand New, Sealed, Mint
Language version: Polish
Subtitles: English
Region: 2 (PAL). European or multi-system DVD player is required to see this DVD.
DVD 1
Border Street (Ulica Graniczna, 1948)
Cast: Mieczyslawa Cwiklinska, Jerzy Leszczynski and Wladyslaw Godik
Plot: The story unfolds through the eyes of four characters who live in the same building: David and Jadzia are two Jewish youths who fight the Nazis as their only choice for survival, while gentiles Bronek and Wladek consider the occupation an insult to their Polish heritage. One of the first post-World War II films to deal with the Holocaust.
DVD 2
The Boys from Barska Street (Piatka z ulicy Barskiej, 1954)
Cast:: Aleksandra Slaska, Tadeusz Janczar and Andrzej Kozak
Plot: In war-ravaged Warsaw, five juvenile delinquents are given probation for stealing, to rehabilitate themselves, but remain under the influence of their profiteer-boss.
DVD 3
The First Day of Freedom (Pierwszy dzien wolnosci, 1964)
Cast: Tadeusz Lomnicki, Beata Tyszkiewicz and Tadeusz Fijewski
Plot: The group of Polish officers, freshly freed from the camp, arrives to the small German city, completely devastated by the war. One of the few remaining citizens are the German doctor, Mr. Rhode and his two young daughters...
BONUS: documentary movie: Kochany i nienawidzony. Dramat życia i smierci twórcy "Krzyzaków" (Loved and hated. Drama of life and death of the creator of "Knights of the Teutonic Order".
About the director:
Aleksander Ford, born c, was born as Mosze Lifszy on November 24, 1908, in Kiev, Russian Empire (now Ukraine).
He made his first feature film, "Mascot" in 1930, after a year of making short silent films. He did not use sound until "The Legion of the Streets" (1932). When World War II began, Ford escaped to the Soviet Union and worked closely with Jerzy Bossak to establish a film unit for the Soviet-sponsored People's Army of Poland in the USSR. The unit was called Czołówka Filmowa Ludowego Wojska Polskiego (or simply Czołówka; spearhead).
After the war, Ford was appointed head of the government-controlled Film Polski and has held enormous sway over the country's entire film industry. With a group of colleagues from the Polish Communist Party they rebuilt most of the film production infrastructure. Roman Polanski wrote in his biography about them: "They included some extremely competent people, notably Aleksander Ford, a veteran party member, who was then an orthodox Stalinist... The real power broker during the immediate postwar period was Ford himself, who established a small film empire of his own." For the next twenty years, Ford served as professor of the state-run National Film School in Łódź (Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa). One of Ford's protégés was the Polish ascent film director Andrzej Wajda.
Ford is perhaps best remembered for directing the first postwar documentary "Majdanek - Cmentarzysko Europy" (Majdanek – the Cemetery of Europe) and the feature film "Krzyzacy" (Knights of the Teutonic Order) 1960, based on a novel of the same name by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz.
Ford, a self-identified Communist, used his films to "express social messages on the screen," as in his documentaries: the award-winning "Legion ulicy", (The Street Legion, 1932), "Children Must Laugh" (1936) and the postwar "Eighth Day of the Week" (1958) rejected by the communist party censors during the Polish October.
Ford continued making films in Poland until the 1968 Polish political crisis. Accused of antisocialist activity and expelled from the Communist Party, Ford emigrated to Israel where he lived for the next two years. He later moved to Denmark and eventually settled in the United States. Ford made two more feature films, both of which were commercial and critical failures. In 1973, he made a film adaptation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel "The First Circle", a Danish-Swedish production that recounted the horrors of the Soviet gulag. In 1975 he made "The Martyr", an English language, Israeli-German co-production based on the heroic story of Dr. Janusz Korczak. Blacklisted by the Polish communist government, Ford became a non-person in contemporary discussions and analysis of Polish filmmaking. Isolated, he committed suicide in a Florida hotel on 4 April 1980.
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