A Generation movie storyline. 1942 in Nazi occupied Poland. Stach lives with his mother in a shanty town outside Warsaw. When he starts working as an apprentice in a small workshop in the nearby suburb, a middle-aged craftsman approaches him. The man is a secret Communist leader, known as Comrade Sekula. He introduces Stach to Dorota, a young political leader in the Organization of Youth Fighters. She tells Stach to form a small resistance group within the organization, and he involves his friends Jacek and Mundek.
Without Stach knowing it, the small workshop is an important hub for another resistance movement, the Polish Underground Army. When Stach finds one of their hidden guns, he steals it. With the gun Jacek kills a Nazi officer. Their group is commissioned to support rebellious Jews in the Ghetto. During this mission Jacek is captured by the Nazis, and kills himself. Stach spends the night making love with Dorota. In the morning he goes out to buy some bread for them. When he returns, he sees Dorota being taken away by Nazi soldiers. Heartbroken by the loss of Dorota and Jacek he sits alone in a field outside the city, when some new recruits of the movement approach him.
A Generation (Polish: Pokolenie) is a 1955 Polish film directed by Andrzej Wajda. It is based on the novel Pokolenie by Bohdan Czeszko, who also wrote the script. It was Wajda’s first film and the opening installment of what became his Three War Films trilogy set in the Second World War, to be followed by Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds.
Because at the time it wasn’t possible to adapt machine guns to shoot blanks, all shots of automatic weapons were done with live ammunition shot into sandbags off screen. The film featured the first documented use of squibs to simulate bullet impacts in movies. For the first time, audiences were presented with a realistic representation of a bullet impacting on an on-camera human being, complete with blood spatter. The creator of the effect, Kazimierz Kutz, used a condom with fake blood and dynamite.
A Generation (1955)
Directed by: Andrzej Wajda
Starring: Tadeusz Łomnicki, Urszula Modrzyńska, Tadeusz Janczar, Janusz Paluszkiewicz, Ryszard Kotys, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Krasowski, Hanna Skarzanka, Janusz Sciwiarski, Juliusz Roland
Screenplay by: Bohdan Czeszko
Production Design by: Ignacy Taub
Cinematography by: Jerzy Lipman
Film Editing by: Czeslaw Raniszewski
Costume Design by: Jerzy Szeski
Set Decoration by: Józef Galewski, Jerzy Skrzepinski
Music by: Andrzej Markowski
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Contemporary Films
Release Date: January 25, 1955
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