Criterion Collection (Firm)

"A sweeping, delirious romance [that] begins in the Polish countryside, where Wiktor, a musician on a state-sponsored mission to collect folk songs, discovers a captivating young singer named Zula. Over the next fifteen years, their turbulent relationship will play out in stolen moments between two worlds: the jazz clubs of decadent, bohemian Paris, to which he escapes, and the corrupt, repressive Communist Bloc, where she remains, universes bridged...

The story of a cocky Polish youth who decides to fight the Nazis after he falls for a pretty resistance leader. As he and his friends help escapees during the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the innocence of a generation is lost under the grueling conditions of war. The first in what has come to be known as the director's 'war trilogy'.

A middle-aged journalist and his wife invite a footloose young hitch-hiker aboard their sail-boat for a Sunday outing in the Polish lake district. Like two peacocks, the men proceed to flaunt their virility before the woman, revealing a cynical sadism on the part of the husband and a growing resentment in the knife-wielding youth.

Follow a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore to explore life on land in an alternate 1980s Poland. Their tantalizing siren songs and otherworldly auras make them overnight sensations as nightclub singers in the half-glam, half-decrepit world of Smoczynska's imagining. The director gives fierce teeth to her viscerally sensual, darkly feminist twist on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," in which the girls' bond is tested and...

Rural Poland, on the last days of World War II. The Nazis have surrendered, and the Red Army has criss-crossed the country. With the battle against the Nazis over, a new struggle emerges against the communists. A group of Polish patriots boldy set out to assassinate a mid-level communist-party functionary. Macick is the trigger man, but when he spots a blonde behind the bar, his priorities change.

Begins on the 56th day of the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis during World War II. A ragtag group of trained and untrained Resistance fighters hold on to the front line. They try to live a relatively normal life, and even find time to play the piano. They achieve small victories, but must retreat into the sewers in order to survive.

"Before he stunned the cinematic world with the epic series The Decalogue and the Three Colors trilogy, the great polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski made his first work of metaphysical genius, Blind Chance, a compelling drama about the difficulty of reconciling political ideals with personal happiness. This unforgettable film follows Witek (the magnetic Boguslaw Linda), a medical student with an uncertain future in Communist Poland; Kieślowski...