Although he was heavily injured in World War I, losing an arm and a leg in military service, Wladyslaw Strzeminski went on to become one of Poland's most important artists, moving modernist abstract painting and sculpture to unparalleled heights. But his avant-garde views fell out of favor in the late 1940s as the nation's Communist leaders began to demand that art conform to their ideas of social realism. Those creative souls who remained individualist were considered enemies of the state and harshly censored.
In "Afterimage," legendary Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda has dramatized Strzeminski's later years, an artistic master exiled and humiliated for sharing his experimental view of the world. The final film Wajda made before his death in 2016, it is heavily didactic, with extended passages of dialogue that resemble ideological communiques. It is also stunningly well acted and painfully powerful to view.
