Andrzej Wajda was born in Suwałki, Poland, in 1926. He moved to Kraków in 1946 and studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, before training as a film director at the Łódź Film School from 1950 to 1954. In 1954, he directed his first feature film, A Generation, the first instalment of a trilogy devoted to life in Poland during the Second World War. In 1981, he was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Man of Iron, which further explored the themes he had begun to examine in 1977 with Man of Marble regarding the manipulative nature of the Polish regime’s propaganda. 2026 marks the centenary of his birth and has been declared the Year of Andrzej Wajda in Poland.