Workers '80

synopsis

A black-and-white record of the final week of the August 1980 strike at the Gdańsk shipyard for better working and social conditions – a strike which soon escalated into a broader political protest against the communist regime in Poland – is introduced by the following caption: “To remain faithful to the truth in the film, recordings have been included which, for technical reasons, are not accompanied by footage.” This acknowledgement of the gaps draws attention to the sound, which was heard live by thousands of workers on the site at the time of filming. The rally is thus present in the film despite the camera remaining fixed on the conference table where the strike committee, led by Lech Wałęsa, sits opposite the government commission. Ten years after the suppression of December ’70, the demand in the secondary title of the censorship-truncated documentary Workers '71 is fulfilled here: Nothing About Us Without Us.

The third of the twenty-one August demands, which the inter-company strike committee presented to the government, called for freedom of speech. Despite protests from the film community, however, the film itself was denied this: the censors did not approve it for general distribution, though they did permit screenings for the purposes of Solidarity. The trade unions hired cinema auditoriums, although the film’s title was not listed in the programmes. Yet by 1981, before the state of emergency silenced the unions, over 4.7 million people had seen the film. According to documentary filmmaker Marcel Łoziński, the film gave them “a sense of immense strength” in the struggle against the communist regime.

biography

Andrzej Zajączkowski (1936–2023) witnessed the protests of the Prague Spring while still a student at FAMU. In July 1969, he was detained in Prague for three months in connection with the “Taternik” case – couriers who were smuggling books into Poland on behalf of the Polish Literary Institute, which was based in Paris. Following the declaration of a state of emergency, he lost his job at the Documentary Film Studio, where he had worked as a screenwriter and director. From 1990 to 1995, he was director of the Polish Institute in Prague.

Andrzej Chodakowski (1936) graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology. In 1980, he won the Silver Lajkonik at the Kraków Short Film Festival for his film Napisz mi coś wesołego (Write Me Something Cheerful). He collaborated on Man of Iron (1981), in which Andrzej Wajda also used footage from Workers ’80. From 1981 to 1989, he lived in Italy, where he represented the Solidarity movement in dealings with the Italian trade unions. From 1999 to 2002, he was the Polish ambassador to Albania.

film details

director:

Andrzej Chodakowski, Andrzej Zajączkowski