The Maids of Wilko

The Maids of Wilko Polish Panny z Wilka is a 1979 Polish drama film directed by Andrzej Wajda. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 52nd Academy Awards. Maids is used in the sense of maidens, hence another translation could be The Maidens of Wilko.

The film is based on a popular short story written in the early 1930s by famous Polish poet Jarosaw Iwaszkiewicz who even appears as himself near the end of the movie. Andrzej Wajda previously filmed another short story of Iwaszkiewicz, The Birch Wood in 1970 and would go to film yet another, Sweet Rush film, in 2009. This particular film features impressive cast, very good although nonoriginal score music of Karol Szymanowski, who was a friend and cousin of Jarosaw Iwaszkiewicz and is otherwise technically brilliant. It received some awards in Poland and was nominated for an Oscar which it lost to The Tin Drum film also starring Olbrychski. Much of this happened because of deliberately avoiding anything that would trigger censorship from the communist authorities that governed Poland at that time. It is quite possible that the whole production was the results of games of influence inside the governmentcontrolled film monopoly in Poland. It appears that the director Andrzej Wajda had built around himself enough buffer space to produce a clearly anticommunist film just two years later, Man of Iron.

Source: Wikipedia