Walesa: Man of Hope

Polish filmmaking legend Andrzej Wajda, at age 87, returns with this biographical film on Lech Walesa (played by Robert Wieckiewicz), the controversial figurehead of the Solidarity - the first mass trade union in the Soviet Bloc - and eventual President.

"Few people can claim to have profoundly changed the world in which they found themselves. Among those few, undoubtedly, is Lech Walesa, an ordinary shipyard worker and electrician who found himself inadvertently leading a quiet revolution that ended up not only toppling a dictatorship in his own country, but also eating away at the crumbling edifice of the Soviet empire in the 1980s.

"Wajda, Poland's greatest filmmaker, and a man who has made his own telling artistic contribution over six decades, turns to Walesa as a subject, dramatizing both the public and private sides of this deceptively simple — but actually very complex — man. Structuring his film around an interview that Walesa (Robert Wieckiewicz) gives to the famed Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci (Maria Rosaria Omaggio) allows Wajda to move easily between past and present, between the great events of the era and the personal life of Lech and his wife Danuta (Agnieszka Grochowska)." (Toronto International Film Festival)

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