Celebrate the centenary of Polish cinema’s grand master with this double bill of his finest literary adaptations: a Yugoslav take on a Russian classic, and an epic Polish period piece.

Andrzej Wajda was one of the great directors of literature. This double bill pairs a rarely-screened gem produced in Yugoslavia with an epic Polish period piece. Adapting Nikolai Leskov’s nineteenth-century novella of adultery and murder, and incorporating Dmitry Shostakovich’s opera on the same source material, Siberian Lady Macbeth (1962) is a Polish-Russian-Yugoslav blend of noir and western. Olivera Marković stars as Katerina Izmailova, an unhappily married woman whose attraction to a carefree swineherd (Ljuba Tadić) sets in motion a chain reaction of crime and punishment. Back in Poland, Wajda would make one of his grandest cinematic statements with The Promised Land (1975), adapted from Nobel laureate Władysław Reymont. In nineteenth-century Łódź, three friends – one Polish, one Jewish, one German – unite to build their fortune amidst the city’s bustling textile factories. Wajda’s vivid panoramas plunge us into a world in which family and tradition are cast aside in the pursuit of power – an unflinching examination of moral decay, as well as a portrait of Poland’s lost multicultural past.