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Polish film director Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016), whose début films portrayed the horror of the German occupation of Poland, won awards at Cannes which established his reputation as storyteller and commentator on Polish history. He also served on the national Senate from 1989-91. [Listener: Jacek Petrycki]

TRANSCRIPT: The making of the film went smoothly. Edward Kosiński was the director of photography. We'd known one another earlier. He had done some of the filming for 'The Promised Land', and this contemporary journalistic style contrasted well with the shots we used as we tried to show the past. There were scenes here shot in colour showing scenes from the past in our protagonists' stories as well as scenes lifted straight from news reports to which we'd added scenes shot in the way films were made in the Fifties. So the film was given several different aspects which is always a good thing for a film. It carried one very clear message which I would say was profoundly uncensorable and forbidden. Namely, a worker is turning to his leaders demanding his rights. This was unthinkable, since the reason why there was a worker's leadership was so that the worker wouldn't have to demand anything. The leadership thought for him, so there was no need for him to turn to them because the leadership itself, being a worker's leadership, was looking after him. However, reality and the truth had a completely different aspect. The system of excellence at work was a way of raising productivity, but raising productivity without paying for the extra work. This became an ideology: if others can do more, then so can you. Of course, these excelling workers very soon became stars for one season, travelling from one building site to another because this was the most visible image of building. When somebody laid 30,000 bricks in one day the results were visible: where before there had been nothing, now there was a wall standing as high as a man. So this was visible and this display, this circus, which is how the brick-layers were often referred to, these brick-laying trios. The Soviet system had been adopted by us. One man would prepare the bricks, another would pass them on and another would lay down the lime which would fix the bricks. This system of a trio was adopted by us, and this circus of excelling workers travelled from one building site to another which the workers hated as they saw no reason why they should work harder and more productively if they weren't being paid for it. However, the Party was searching for a way of increasing productivity which from year to year was decreasing. And this whole lie, this deception suddenly found itself in this film with total openness. Why weren't we afraid? Who were we supposed to be afraid of? We were making a film with the profound conviction that someone has to say this. This is what Ścibor-Rylski, who'd written the screenplay, thought, this was what I thought and it's what those young actors thought. We were just talking about what had happened. It's true that the film became entwined with our reality of the Gierek era which was different, those other times seemed to have been consigned to a museum, in the old news reels. New times were coming, everything was looking different, there was the appearance, so to speak, of a different better world. The one with the other, combined. It was an amazing film, very contemporary, immediate. And it had this moral which was astonishing because no one then had dared to make such a film. It was the only film that stood up for the rights of those workers. That's when I remembered the scene from 'A Generation' where an old man with a beard, Karl Marx, uses the mouth of the master who's instructing the youngster making a door to explain about surplus value. Here this surplus value was exposed in all its rawness. This surplus vale was being taken from the worker by someone and it turned out that it was the socialist state that was taking it and doing whatever it like with it.