← Back

Ashes and Diamonds

Original title: Popiól i diament · Turkish title: Küller ve Elmaslar

“Touched with the fire and rebellion of a new generation of Polish film makers”

1958 · 1 h 43 min
Directed by Andrzej Wajda
DramaRomanceWar

Cast

Zbigniew Cybulski Ewa Krzyżewska Adam Pawlikowski

Credits

Written by: Jerzy Andrzejewski

Plot

On the last day of the Second World War in Poland, a young resistance fighter, Maciek, is ordered to assassinate a Communist official. He kills the wrong men, falls in love with a barmaid, Krystyna, and begins to doubt his mission. Andrzej Wajda's 1958 film, with Zbigniew Cybulski in dark glasses, is a tragic study of a generation caught between ideologies, and is one of the central works of Polish cinema.

Sinekatalog’s take

Andrzej Wajda's postwar Polish classic follows a young resistance fighter assigned to kill an official. Zbigniew Cybulski, in dark glasses, is iconic, and the film's final scene is searing.Sinekatalog’s own editorial review – not a user or critic quote.

Ratings

IMDb: 7.7 / 10 (15,276 votes)
IMDb rating and vote count from the IMDb ratings dataset (October 2026). Scores change over time.

If you liked this

Picked by director, genre, era and shared cast. Titles only, no spoilers.