For this year’s Part 1 of the Polish Film Festival, we are focusing on films collected and held by the George Eastman Museum. The collection highlights the period of time following the end of Stalinism in the mid-1950s. At that time in the country’s cinema, production was organized into “film groups,” collectives led by an experienced director and consisting of directors, writers, and production managers. This led to the rise of the Polish Film School movement, which trained some of the most-renowned Polish directors and artists. The three features in this series feature such prominent directors: Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski, and Jerzy Skolimowski. This cinema was able to address the complexity of Polish history during World War II, and began to explore the national character of Poles in contrast to the homogeneity of communist rule. These features will be supplemented by two short films in the collection that metaphorically address the military state and the need for large-scale change.