Iron Curtain Collection

Film Movement’s Iron Curtain Collection explores the profundity of the Cold War and its far-reaching effects on Eastern Europe. Featuring the final film in the fêted career of Polish director Andrzej Wajda, a documentarian searching for answers about her family’s Stasi past, and a sinister tale of communism infiltrating the Catholic Church of Czechoslovakia.

AFTERIMAGE (2016, directed by Andrzej Wajda)
The great Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s last film is a passionate biopic about avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński (played by Polish superstar Boguslaw Linda), who battled Stalinist orthodoxy and his own physical impairments to advance his progressive ideas about art.

KARL MARX CITY (2016, directed by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker)
25 years after the collapse of the GDR, filmmaker Petra Epperlein returns to the proletarian Oz of her childhood to find the truth about her late father’s suicide and his rumored Stasi past. Reconstructing everyday GDR life through declassified Stasi surveillance footage, the past plays like dystopian science fiction, providing a chilling backdrop to interrogate the apparatus of control and the meaning of truth in a society where every action and thought was suspect.

SERVANTS (2020, directed by Ivan Ostrochovský)
In Czechoslovakia, 1980, the Communist regime demands allegiance from all its subjects. Michal and Juraj, students of a theological seminary, must decide if they will collaborate with the government or becoming targets of the secret police.

"The final film by the great Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016) tells the story of another major Polish artist. Wladyslaw Strzeminski, who lost both an arm and a leg in World War I, was a leading abstract artist in the 1930s and ‘40s, but when the Soviet Union installed a Communist government in Poland after the war he was hounded, denounced, and attacked for refusing to betray his principles... It’s a fitting final word from a filmmaker who also challenged Soviet culture commissars and censors throughout his own career. Recommended." - Video Librarian, on AFTERIMAGE