13th Dubai International Film Festival, 14 December 2016.

The last movie of Andrzej Wajda tells the story of one of the best artists of the 20th Century, Wladyslaw Strzeminski.

The movie states that the situation of a true artist is miserable in spite of the geography, language and culture. Wladyslaw Strzeminski is a great painter, and is suffering due to his personal views, during a great social reformation in Poland. He loose his job, artist license canceled, and ignored in every corner of life. Though his students try to support him, it doesn't make much use. Hungry and sick, a great artist faces the tough realities of life.

The performance of the cast are amazing. Boguslaw Linda as Strzeminski and all the remaining cast have done a wonderful job. Photography and direction is so superb.

I noticed the audience after the movie, they had tears in their eyes. It is so heart touching. Do not miss this movie, if you are a real movie freak!

For what proved his cinematic swansong, the 90 year-old Andrzej Wajda came full circle, returning to the generation who provided the subject (and title) for the film that first made his name over 60 years ago. Wajda would have been the same age as the adoring students gathered around the avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński (1893-1952) at the art school at Łódź he had co-founded in 1945; but as a one-man awkward squad he was soon drawing the fire of the postwar communist authorities.

The sustained official campaign of death by a thousand cuts inflicted on Strzemiński strongly recalls that depicted in Wajda's earlier 'Rough Treatment' (1978),to which 'Afterimage' often feels like a prequel. The earlier film, however, was an angry, brutally contemporary film, while 'Afterimage' - while vividly conveying the Orwellian nightmare that was Stalinist Poland - is a much mellower piece recalling the far-off days of Wajda's youth with a grace and energy wholly belying his astonishing age; and Andrzej Mularczyk's script gleams throughout with flashes of wry black humour. The film has few out and out villains, with most of Strzemiński's persecutors sympathetic but powerless to resist.

The jagged widescreen photography of Pawel Edelman and design by Marek Warszewski simultaneously evoke the monochromatic drabness of life under communism while often looking vaguely expressionistic, with odd flashes of colour skilfully deployed. (A particular visual highlight is the priceless scene early on in which his studio is saturated with red light from a banner of Stalin erected directly outside his window, to which his already characteristic response is guaranteed to get him into trouble.)

Bogusław Linda's performance as Strzemiński would be impressive enough even without the remarkable technical feat he accomplishes of nipping about on crutches minus his left arm and left leg, while Bronislawa Zamachowska is tremendous as his equally resilient and bloody-minded daughter Nika; truly a chip off the old block.

this is the basic feeling. it is a film about present. not only for remind the Communist regime profound traces in every day life. but for the dictatorship of bureaucracy. for the desire of unanimity. for the role of person as tool. and for the politically correctness who is not real far by the Communist dictatorship. it is , in same measure, a significant last word of Wajda. not only as legacy. but as remember of his themes, message, precise exposure of the action of the evil, crash of the artist, forms of freedom out of political rules. a film about present, maybe, only from the perspective of an Easter European.