Kanal

The setting for the second film in Wajda's trilogy about WWII (coming between A Generation and Ashes and Diamonds) is the sewers of Warsaw, through which a group of partisans attempt to make their escape from the Nazis during the 1944 Uprising. This was the film that made Wajda's name in the West, and it certainly has a unique intensity and gloom, with most of the characters enduring appalling fates: two lovers reach an exit to find it sealed off with a grill, another man surfaces right into German hands. Nevertheless, scenes such as the musician playing Chopin amid the ruins have a peculiar poetry that speaks of an experience that demands to be reinvented.