Canal

This is the 2nd in famed Polish Andrzej Wajda WWII trilogy (preceded by “A Generation” [55] and followed by “Ashes and Diamonds” [58]). Set in Warsaw during the last days of the Polish uprising in the summer of 1944, the film tells of Polish civilians and soldiers who were no more capable of pursuing the resistance to the Nazi occupation and retreat from a certain death to a relative liberty through the city’s sewers for the “last hours of their lives” as declared in the early in the film by the voice over, hours of suffering, treason, despair, suicide and death. Wajda was awarded the “Special Jury Prize” at the 1957 Cannes International Film Festival.