Kinoteka Polish Film Festival on Tour heads to Newcastle, 14 March - 25 March
Running alongside the main festival in London, the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, organised by the Polish Cultural Institute in London, is touring the UK with a stunning retrospective line-up of films by Andrzej Wajda. Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the iconic film director’s birth, the festival will be in Newcastle from 14 March - 25 March.
In 2026, the festival continues its tradition of retrospectives of grand film directors, celebrating the centenary of Andrzej Wajda’s birth with a retrospective that spans six decades of the filmmaker’s work. The retrospective will present and analyse the Academy Award-winning director’s politically engaged filmmaking career from his early years making films under post-war communism to his work during the Solidarność movement.
Spearheading Kinoteka on Tour is Wajda's revered classic Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1958), which will screen in Newcastle from a 35mm print.
‘Wajda had a long, creative career and left behind an extraordinary legacy. His works were inspiring around the world.’ - Martin Scorsese
NEWCASTLE LINE-UP
In the last days of the Second World War, Maciek, a Polish resistance fighter, is tasked with the assassination of a Communist official. When he meets Krystyna, he is offered a glimpse of a world beyond war and destruction, and questions his assignment. Wajda’s classic drama, which cemented his position as a world-class filmmaker, features an iconic central performance by Cybulski – the ‘Polish James Dean’ – who contributes immeasurably to this probing look at the complex post-war future for a new nation and its people. It’s essential viewing.
In his final film, Wajda returns to previously explored themes of personal and artistic resistance to an authoritarian state and ideology. Based on the life of avant-garde painter and theorist Władysław Strzemiński, the film chronicles his struggles against expulsion from state institutions, and erasure from a nation’s collective memory, as a result of political and artistic convictions that were at odds with the official Stalinist post-war doctrine.
Kinoteka on Tour takes place at Newcastle's Tyneside Cinema from 14 to 25 March 2026
