Afterimage

Afterimage (Powidoki, 2016) is a Polish historical drama you can watch online on iFILM — and the final film completed by Andrzej Wajda, who died in October 2016, weeks after the edit was locked. The subject is Władysław Strzemiński, a real avant-garde painter who invented a theory he called Unism and refused to subordinate it to the demands of Socialist Realism in Stalinist Poland.

Bogusław Linda plays Strzemiński — missing his right arm and right leg, lost in the First World War — with a stubbornness that reads as both dignity and a slow-moving disaster. His students adore him. The state erases him: first from his teaching chair, then from the Artists' Union, eventually from the museum walls themselves. The process is meticulous. Bureaucratic. That's what makes it so disturbing.

Wajda spent his career filming Polish history from inside it, and here the anger is quiet and precise. Not a dramatic confrontation but a portrait of an artist ground down one official document at a time. Stream Afterimage online on iFILM.