Academy of Polish Film The Promised Land

Polish Film Academy — Wajda. The director of the painting SPACE AND ARCHITECTURE — MAN IN FRONT OF THE MATTER OF THE WORLD The Promised Land (1974) lecture: Dr. Konrad Gliściński Three friends — Polish Karol Borowiecki, German Maks Baum and Jew Moryc Welt — wants to set up a textile factory in Łódź. To achieve their goal, they must use various tricks forced by the ruthless industrialists of Łódź, the cotton tycoons. After a fire in their newly built spinning mill, they disperse. Karol misappropriates noble ideals, breaks off his engagement with Anka in order to take possession of the most powerful capital of Łódź by marrying Mada, the daughter of Mueller's greatest manufacturer. In the final sequence, Borowiecki deals with a striker strike by issuing an order to shoot the crowd.

The adaptation of the novel about the early capitalist Lodz became for Wajda a farewell to the Polish romantic and noble arcade. Following the story of the realization of the dream of making a fortune, the director presented a naturalistic and baroque synthesis of moral attitudes in a ruthless, fascinating vulgarity struggle for money. A cinematic vision oscillating between realistic reconstruction and baroque symbolism, combined with concrete in the description of an industrial whiz, in which the lust for money and ruthlessness in satisfying one's own whims went below ethics and culturally accepted behavior.

Jan Słodowski, Lexicon of Polish Feature Films, Warsaw 1996