The last and loudest entry in Wajda’s WWII trilogy, Ashes and Diamonds adapts Jerzy Andrzejewski’s eponymous 1948 novel into one of Polish cinema’s strongest and most celebrated works. Set on May 8, 1945—Victory Day in Europe—after Red Army battalions had already expelled the occupier out of Poland, the historical thriller stars anti-Communist Home Army insurgents in a doomed underground plot to resist Soviet rule. In his performance as militant Maciek, Zbigniew Cybulski approaches and at times surpasses the youthful, tragic cool of James Dean, while Jerzy Wójcik’s stark camerawork ignites an inflammatory script into Wajda’s fiercest unraveling of national myth and taboo. Overflowing with Christian symbolism, the film was the director’s proudest achievement; it remains to this day a widely discussed touchstone of the Polish Film School and one of modern cinema’s richest interrogations of agency and belief in the face of futility and (overwhelming, ambivalent) defeat.