The premiere screening of the director’s cut of Walesa: Man of Hope will take place during 49 th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The movie was created especially for the event with a support of Unipetrol, the company from ORLEN Group, which is also among the Partners of this year’s edition of the event.
Alongside Lech Walesa, the world’s premiere of the director’s cut will be attended by the leading actors Robert Więckiewicz and Agnieszka Grochowska. The visit and the special screening are part of special event organized by Unipetrol, a part of ORLEN Group.
Andrzej Wajda, the most prominent Polish director of the 20 th century, has filmed a biography of one of the key figures of modern Polish history. In Walesa: Man of Hope, Wajda illustrates the phenomenon of former polish president – the head of the Solidarity trade-union movement – and his transformation from an ordinary worker into a charismatic leader. Walesa’s controversial personality continues to spark heated debate even today, though the fact remains that he helped millions of people to make the suppressed dream of freedom a reality, and set the stage for political changes that no one at the time could even imagine.
Lech Walesa was born on September 29, 1943. In August of 1980 he led a strike at the shipyard in Gdańsk. He fought for workers’ dignity and right to assemble. When martial law was declared in December of 1981 he was imprisoned and put in isolation. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. During the process of transformation he played a key role in negotiations between the Communist Party and the opposition. In 1990, Walesa was elected as the President of Poland. He held the office until 1995.
“I am very well aware of the fact that ‘Walesa’ is the most difficult topic I have ever come across in my 55-year film career. Nonetheless, no director has made a film about him that I found satisfactory, so I simply had no choice,“ says director Andrzej Wajda.
The movie, which was written by well-known Polish writer and playwright Janusz Głowacki, has become the most successful domestic film at the box office this year in Poland. With his portrait of Walesa, the world-renowned director symbolically ties in to his celebrated film of 1981, Man of Iron, which dealt with the events surrounding the rise of Solidarity and the momentous strike at the Gdańsk Shipyards, and won the Palme d´Or at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for the best foreign film.
