Andrzej Wajda, the Polish film and theatre producer and director who restored his country’s consciousness of its torment at the hands of its Russian and Nazi German enemies, died on October 9 in Warsaw at the age of 90. His body of work made him an outstanding personality in the past 60 years of cinema history. He was modest and wrote, “Films made in Eastern Europe seem of little or no interest to people in the West,” in his 1989 memoir, Double Vision: My Life in Film. Yet the impact of his canon was much wider than that remark would suggest.

His main early films expressed a dark realism—not “socialist realism,” but a unique variety of “resistance realism.” Decades later, Wajda contributed to the rise and triumph of the Solidarity labor movement, which swept Communism from its rule over Poland in 1989.