86 Films & TV Shows Set In Poland During The 20th Century
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Angry Harvest
π΅π± Poland The 1940sIn the winter of 1942-43, a Jewish family leaps from a train going through Silesia. They are separated in the woods, and Leon, a local peasant who's now a farmer of some wealth, discovers the woman, Rosa, and hides her in his cellar. Leon's a middle-aged Catholic bachelor, tormented by his sexual drive. He doesn't tell Rosa he's seen signs her husband is alive, and he begs her to love him. Rosa offers herself to Leon if he'll help a local Jew in hiding who needs money. Leon pays, and love between Rosa and him does develop, but then Leon's peasant subservience and his limited empathy lead to tragedy. At the war's end, a ray of sunshine comes from an unexpected place.
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War and Love
π΅π± Poland The 1940sThey fought their way out of Hell and found each other. β Jacek, who is Jewish, miraculously manages to survive World War II in Nazi-occupied Poland. As a subplot to Jacek's story, which also involves a love affair with Haling ( Kyra Sedgwick ) and German soldiers' repeated attempts to kill him, is a tale of how young kids in the Warsaw ghetto devise their own method of fighting oppression.
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Pope John Paul II
π΅π± Poland The 1950s The 1960s The 1970s The 1940sBio-drama tracing the life and career of Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla from his days as a young activist in Poland to his rise and installation in 1978 as Pope of the Catholic world.
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Yentl
π΅π± Poland The 1900sIn a time when the world of study belonged only to men, there lived a girl who dared to ask why? β Rebbe Mendel is a single father who teaches the Talmud, a sacred text of Judaism, to the boys of his small Polish town. Behind closed doors, he also instructs his daughter, Yentl, despite the fact that girls are forbidden to study religious scripture. When Yentl's father dies, she still has a strong desire to learn about her faith -- so she disguises herself as a male, enrolls in a religious school, and unexpectedly finds love along the way.
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The Turning Point
π΅π± Poland The 1940sIn the fall of 1945, nineteen year-old Mark Niebuhr, is accused of murder and is jailed as a prisoner of war in Warsaw, Poland. He maintains his claim of innocence throughout long periods of solitary confinement. When Mark is placed among a group of Polish criminals, he becomes the target of their aggression. Later, Mark experiences true hell in a communal cell with fanatical German war criminals. Turning Point is based on actual events from Hermann Kant's novel of the same name.
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Man of Iron
π΅π± Poland The 1980sIn Warsaw in 1980, the Communist Party sends Winkel, a weak, alcoholic TV hack, to Gdansk to dig up dirt on the shipyard strikers, particularly on Maciek Tomczyk, an articulate worker whose father was killed in the December 1970 protests. Posing as sympathetic, Winkel interviews the people surrounding Tomczyk, including his detained wife, Agnieszka.
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Vabank
π΅π± Poland The 1930sOctober 1934. Poland. Famous bank robber Kwinto decided to quit his dangerous criminal job, but after his friend's death, he changed his mind and organized a burglary of famous and well protected bank which belonged to his former partner in crime, backstabbing and double-crossing Kramer. Kwinto designs a clever plan not to only rob the Kramer's bank but to make it look like Kramer himself did it.
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Fever
π΅π± Poland The 1910s The 1900sThe film is set in 1905, in a time of feverish revolutionary underground activity in Poland partitioned between three neighbours. All the characters are committed anarchists. The bomb maker puts an invention together to place it at the disposal of young inexperienced terrorists fighting against Tsarist oppression. The story follows the passing of this bomb from anarchist to anarchist as several attempts are made on the life of Tsarist governor general, until, at the end, it is effectively and harmlessly defused by a bomb expert. The presence of the bomb has a destroying effect on all of the Polish revolutionaries, they either die or breakdown.
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The Tin Drum
π©πͺ Germany π΅π± Poland The 1940s The 1930s The 1920s The 1910s The 1900s The 1890sA savage, sweeping epic of society in chaos. β Oskar is born in Germany in 1924 with an advanced intellect. Repulsed by the hypocrisy of adults and the irresponsibility of society, he refuses to grow older after his third birthday.
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The Magician of Lublin
π΅π± Poland The 1900sHe brings audiences to their feetβ¦ and women to their knees β Yasha is a Jewish stage magician who tours through eastern Europe while destroying his career through personal problems. He has one more chance at theatrical success, but he needs to do a brand new trick in a Warsaw theater.
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Without Anesthesia
π΅π± Poland The 1960sA famous Polish journalist presents a problem for the powers-that-be when he displays his full political skill and knowledge on a television show featuring questions and answers on a world conference by a panel of journalists. His enemies take away his privileges when he is away. The shock of being "unwanted" parallels a deeper disappointment in his private life: his wife has an affair with a jealous young rival, and after 15 years of marriage and two daughters wants a divorce. She offers no explanations as he tries to untie these problems himself. All the moves he makes are the wrong ones. He takes on drinking heavily with students eager to attend his seminar after discovering the class has been canceled. The journalist, once suave and commanding is reduced to silence.
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Death of a President
π΅π± Poland The 1920sAfter Poland won freedom from of its long overlordship by Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, it took a further four years for its National Assembly to elect Gabriel Narutowicz as its first president. Narutowicz was a professor who until his election had been living in Switzerland. Those were chaotic times, and shortly after his election, he was assassinated by right-wing fanatics. This epic Polish film chronicles the circumstances of Narutowicz's election and assassination.
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The Cassandra Crossing
π΅π± Poland π¨π Switzerland π©πͺ Germany The 20th CenturyThe Fear Is Spreading β Passengers on a European train have been exposed to a deadly disease, and nobody will let them off the train.
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Nicholas and Alexandra
π΅π± Poland The 1910s The 1900s...is the story of the love that changed the world forever! β Tsar Nicholas II, the inept last monarch of Russia, insensitive to the needs of his people, is overthrown and exiled to Siberia with his family.
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The Taste of the Black Earth
π΅π± Poland The 1920sDuring the 1920 Silesian uprising, seven brothers take part in the struggle with the Germans to keep the region in the Polish hands.
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The Night of the Generals
π«π· France π©πͺ Germany π΅π± Poland The 1960s The 1940sA unique manhunt across the capitals of Europe... across three decades up to today! β An unusual World War II crime thriller about a Nazi investigation into the murder of a prostitute. Major Grau finds himself focusing on three suspects: the Generals Tanz, Kahlenberg and Seydlitz-Gabler β all three of whom, it seems, are also involved in a plot to kill Hitler
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Major 'Whirlwind'
π΅π± Poland The 1940sThe Nazis planted explosives to blow up the cities of Krakow and Prague, but the underground resistance in Poland works with the Russians to stop the disaster.
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Lenin in Poland
π΅π± Poland The 1900s The 1910sThe life of the great Bolshevik leader before the Russian revolution is chronicled in this bio-pic. Much of the tale centers on his exile in Poland where Lenin becomes friends with two peasants. The little girl has a strong belief in the nationalist cause. Later Lenin hears she was killed for withholding information about him.
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Samson
π΅π± Poland The 1940sSampson is one of several Andrzej Wajda films harking back to his youth during the Nazi Occupation of Poland. Many of these concern not only the struggle between good and evil, but also between passive and impassive. The hero is a Jewish youth. He, like his family, has always been silent and undemonstrative in the face of prejudice. Now he stands up for his right to survive, and in so doing represents the fighting spirit that culminated in the 1943 Warsaw Uprising. It was originally titled Samson, but re-spelled as Sampson upon its American release to avoid confusion with a sword-and-sandal epic of the same name.
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Ashes and Diamonds
π΅π± Poland The 1940sTouched with the fire and rebellion of a new generation of Polish film makers β It's May 1945, and Nazi Germany has just surrendered. The war is over, but not in Poland. As the German soldiers vacate, the remaining Russian forces and Polish resistance fighters must work out the hierarchies of power in "liberated" Communist Poland. A Polish assassin is given orders to kill a Russian soldier whom he, days before, was fighting alongside, and this moral conflict makes him question the goals for which he has been fighting.
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Frieda
π΅π± Poland The 1940sThe film that puts the question - Would YOU take Frieda into YOUR Home? β A young German girl marries an Englishman and moves into his family's household during the last days of World War II. The family and community have conflicting feelings about her presence in the community, and as a result, the family is forced to face their own moral code as they deal with their own prejudices and fears about the seemingly innocent German girl. The war ends, and she finally seems to be accepted into the family and community when her Nazi brother shows up to create havoc.
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In Our Time
π΅π± Poland The 1930sTheir Love was all these things β It is early 1939 in Poland when Mrs. Bromley and Jennifer come to buy antiques for her business in London. Jennifer meets Count Stephen and they wine, dine and see the sights though out the city. He wishes to marry, but his family is against plain Jennifer. When she tries to leave, he catches her at the train station and they are married. To be self sufficient, they modernize the family farm with tractors and increase production, but then Germany starts the war.
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Dream
π΅π± Poland πΊπ¦ Ukraine The 1930sThe spiritual and material misery of a group of people inhabiting the hotel of the title during the War.
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