“Complex, tender, agonising, it makes a country’s moral dilemma as personal as love, and the pain of moral disillusion as immediate a torment as, say, disillusion in love.”
The last day of World War II, and a young Polish Resistance fighter is ordered to kill the newly arrived Communist district leader. However, his target was a fellow soldier and the would-be-assassin is torn between the demands of conscience and of loyalty - his Hamletesque dithering further complicated by his falling for a girl in the hotel at which he and the communist official are staying. Andrzej Wajda is widely considered one of the greatest directors of Eastern European cinema, and Ashes & Diamonds his finest achievement.
