The Senate of the Republic of Poland has declared 2026 the Year of Andrzej Wajda. The resolution, passed unanimously in May 2025, marks two dates falling in the same year: the hundredth anniversary of the director’s birth and the tenth of his death.
Polish Film Festival North America will mark the year with a special exhibition devoted to Wajda, presented under the patronage and with the support of the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Chicago.
The exhibition runs for the full length of the festival, 6–22 November 2026, at Dwell Studio on Irving Park in Chicago — open throughout, so there is no single evening to catch.
It is difficult to overstate what his films did. A Generation, Kanał and Ashes and Diamonds gave the Polish Film School its shape in the 1950s. Man of Marble and Man of Iron put the country’s recent history on screen at a moment when doing so carried a cost; the latter took the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1981. Danton brought him a BAFTA, Pan Tadeusz brought Mickiewicz to a mass audience, and Afterimage closed the body of work in 2016.
He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film four times and received an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2000.
For our audiences in North America the exhibition is also a way of showing how far his reach extended — including into the careers of actors who are with us this year. Our Honorary Guest, Jan Englert, made his film debut at fourteen in Wajda’s Kanał, and appeared half a century later in Katyń.
