Image copyright AP Image caption Many of Andrzej Wajda's films were inspired by Poland's turbulent history

Oscar-winning Polish film director Andrzej Wajda has died aged 90, the Polish Filmmakers' Association has confirmed.

He made more than 40 feature films in a career spanning 60 years.

Many of his films - including Kanal, Man of Marble, Man of Iron and Katyn - were inspired by Poland's turbulent wartime and communist history.

In 2000, Wajda was awarded an honorary Oscar for his contribution to world cinema.

'Be alert to everything'

Wajda had been recently taken to hospital.

Unconfirmed reports say he died of lung failure.

Poland's former prime minister and the current head of the European Council, Donald Tusk, tweeted: "We all stem from Wajda. We looked at Poland and at ourselves through him. And we understood better. Now it will be more difficult."

Film director and head of the Polish Filmmakers' Association Jacek Bromski told Polish broadcaster TVN24: "He was one of the greatest Polish artists, one of the best-known in the world. Poland was his passion.

"For us, for the community he was a pillar of strength, everybody gathered around him. He was always present in the life of the film-making community, he was a mentor, a paragon."

Wajda's last film Powidoki (Afterimage) tells the life story of the avant-garde painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski, who suffered under the post-war Stalinist government in Poland.

The director said he wanted to "warn against state intervention in art".

'Feel the love'

The film was recently chosen as Poland's official entry for the best foreign language film at the 2017 Oscars.

Four of Wajda's earlier works had been nominated for that category. Man of Iron won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1981.

Wajda once said that "the good Lord gave the director two eyes - one to look into the camera, the other to be alert to everything that is going on around him."

Other tributes included one from film critic Tomasz Raczek, who wrote on Twitter: "Polish cinema will be in mourning for a long time."

Actor Daniel Olbrychski, who starred in 13 of Wajda's movies, including The Promised Land' and The Maids of Wilko, said he had never met another director who worked with actors so well.

"We could feel the love of our audience through him. But when he frowned just a little, I knew I had to try and do it better," Olbrychski told TVN24.

Image copyright Reuters Image caption Wajda received his honorary Oscar from Jane Fonda in 2000

Wajda was born in 1926 in the north-eastern Polish town of Suwalki.

His father was among the victims of the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers by the Soviet Union in 1940.

Wajda tried to follow in his father's footsteps, but was rejected by a military academy, and joined the Polish resistance in World War Two.

During the war, Wajda joined the Polish resistance. He later studied to be a painter, before entering the Lodz Film School.

In 1955, he made his feature film debut with Generation, set during the German occupation of Warsaw in World War Two. It was followed by Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds, which form a trilogy about life in wartime Poland.

'I lived to see freedom'

Some of his films found disfavour with the communist rulers of Poland because of their trenchant portraits of the wartime Warsaw Uprising and the suppression of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s.

It was only after the fall of communism in 1989 that he was able to make his film about Katyn.

"I never thought I would live to see the moment when Poland would be a free country," Wajda said in a 2007 interview with the Associated Press.

"I thought I would die in that system. It was so surprising and so extraordinary that I lived to see freedom."

Following Poland's first free elections in 1990, he served for two years as a senator in the upper house of parliament.

Wajda is survived by his fourth wife, actress and stage designer Krystyna Zachwatowicz, and his daughter, Karolina.

Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram, or if you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.</s>Oscar-winning Polish film director Andrzej Wajda has died aged 90, the Polish Filmmakers’ Association has confirmed.

He made more than 40 feature films in a career spanning 60 years.

Many of his films – including Kanal, Man of Marble, Man of Iron and Katyn – were inspired by Poland’s turbulent wartime and communist history.

In 2000, Wajda was awarded an honorary Oscar for his contribution to world cinema. ‘Be alert to everything’

Wajda had been recently taken to hospital.

Unconfirmed reports say he died of lung failure.

Wajda’s last film Powidoki (Afterimage) tells the life story of the avant-garde painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski, who suffered under the post-war Stalinist government in Poland.

The director said he wanted to “warn against state intervention in art”.

The film was recently chosen as Poland’s official entry for the best foreign language film at the 2017 Oscars.

Four of Wajda’s earlier works had been nominated for that category. Man of Iron won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981.

Wajda once said that “the good Lord gave the director two eyes – one to look into the camera, the other to be alert to everything that is going on around him.”

Wajda was born in 1926 in the north-eastern Polish town of Suwalki.

His father was among the victims of the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers by the Soviet Union in 1940.

Wajda tried to follow in his father’s footsteps, but was rejected by a military academy, and joined the Polish resistance in World War Two.

During World War Two, Wajda joined the Polish resistance. He later studied to be a painter, before entering the Lodz Film School.

In 1955, he made his feature film debut with Generation, set during the German occupation of Warsaw in World War Two. It was followed by Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds, which form a trilogy about life in wartime Poland.

Some of his films found disfavour with the communist rulers of Poland because of their trenchant portraits of the wartime Warsaw Uprising and the suppression of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s.

It was only after the fall of communism in 1989 that he was able to make his film about Katyn.

“I never thought I would live to see the moment when Poland would be a free country,” Wajda said in a 2007 interview with the Associated Press.

“I thought I would die in that system. It was so surprising and so extraordinary that I lived to see freedom.”

Following Poland’s first free elections in 1990, he served for two years as a senator in the upper house of parliament.</s>The news came from Poland yesterday that Andrzej Wajda passed away at the age of 90. Roman Polanski may have been his country’s most famous film director (thanks to his Hollywood career and the sex-assault scandal that banished him from there), but Wajda was just as masterful and more influential inside Poland. Wajda’s career spanned 60 years, winning prizes at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, an honorary Oscar in 2000, and a lifetime achievement prize from the European Film Awards.

Wajda (pronounce his last name VAI-da) was born in 1926, a pretty bad time to be born in Poland. His father was murdered in 1940 as part of what became known as the Katyń massacre, as invading Soviet soldiers systematically killed thousands of military and police officers and intellectuals. As a teenager, he followed his father’s footsteps into the army and participated in resistance activities against both the Soviets and the Nazis. After graduating from film school after World War II, Wajda started directing theater, but he also helmed his first film A Generation back in 1955. He continued to strike a balance between the two media throughout his life.

Too many of Wajda’s films are not widely available in America. You’re most likely to find Ashes and Diamonds, his blazing 1958 spy thriller set in Warsaw immediately after the Nazi surrender. It’s here you find the hallmarks of Wajda’s style, the stripped-down realism coupled with buried references to subversive material, in this case the Warsaw Uprising. The 1944 attempt by Polish resistance to retake their capital from the Nazis wound up being thwarted when expected help from the Soviet Army did not materialize. Wajda couldn’t allude to this directly with his country under Communist control, but he managed to sneak references to it into the film. The movie draws much of its dramatic power from electrifying lead actor Zbygniew Cybulski, a frequent collaborator of Wajda’s who exudes effortless tragic glamour as the doomed, sunglasses-wearing resistance agent. The performance is even spookier if you take it as a presage of Cybulski’s own doom — the actor died before his 40th birthday in a train accident that was witnessed by his personal friend Marlene Dietrich.

Wajda spent most of his career in a country that was not free, so he became an expert in cloaking his films’ political content in symbolism and other guises. His 1983 French-language epic Danton has a visual opulence to it that you don’t typically find in Wajda. Nevertheless, his movie set during the French Revolution is clearly about the Communist revolution in his own country, which he saw turning on itself and claiming its own high-level administrators as victims. To underscore the divide, Danton (Gérard Depardieu) and his supporters are largely played by French actors, while Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak) and his allies are portrayed by French-speaking Poles. Sometimes the provocation in his work poked its head above the surface, as in his 1981 film Man of Iron, which gave a cameo role to Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa and made repercussions for Wajda and his backers. However, Wajda rode out the storm and continued working until the very end, directing a highly regarded 2007 film about the massacre that killed his father called Katyń. His final film, Afterimage, played last month at the Toronto Film Festival and is slated for release next year. We can only hope that Wajda’s death spurs a retrospective that makes more of his films available here. I’d like to see Nastazja, his 1994 Japanese-language adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

In the meantime, the day before Wajda’s death, I was at the Angelika theater in Dallas watching Demon, a Polish horror film about a man who becomes possessed by a demon at his own wedding. The last film by Marcin Wrona (who committed suicide while promoting it) owes a good deal to the Jewish legend of the dybbuk, but even more to Wajda’s films. The old master would have recognized the realistic aesthetic and the wild shifts in tone between comedy and tragedy, but even more so he would have savored how the film cleverly alludes to atrocities that the Poles inflicted on themselves under foreign rule and the country’s desperate need to pretend that it wasn’t responsible for all those bad things. Paweł Pawlikowski won an Oscar last year for Ida, a Wajda-esque film that treats this same subject seriously, but there’s nothing quite like a spirit from the next world to make people confront their hidden past. I hope Andrzej Wajda got a chance to see Demon before he passed on. I think he would have been proud to see himself in it.</s>WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland’s leading filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, whose career maneuvering between a repressive communist government and an audience yearning for freedom won him international recognition and an honorary Oscar, has died. He was 90.

Wajda had recently been hospitalized and died Sunday night, according to his colleague, film director Jacek Bromski.

Wajda’s last movie “Afterimage,” a biopic about an avant-garde artist, was recently chosen as Poland’s official entry for the 2016 Oscar for best foreign language film.

In 2000, Wajda received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. Four of his films, including “Man of Iron” and Katyn” were nominated for Oscars.

The director trod on ground controlled by communist-era censors with “Man of Marble,” which looked at the roots of worker discontent in communist Poland in the 1950s; and “Man of Iron” on the rise of the Solidarity movement.</s>Wajda won international acclaim for "Man of Iron" (1981), which tells the story of the anti-Communist Solidarity movement, and the film's subversive predecessor "Man of Marble" (1977).

Fans, film-makers and political leaders rushed online to pay tribute after his death was announced late on Sunday.

"We all stem from Wajda. We looked at Poland and at ourselves through him. And we understood better. Now it will be more difficult," Poland's former prime minister and the current head of the European Council, Donald Tusk, said on social media.

Communist authorities censored the "Man of Marble," angered by its portrayal of political corruption in the early 1950s Stalinist period, shown through the fall from grace of a Stakhanovite bricklayer.

"Man of Iron," which portrays the 1980 strikes that led to the creation of the Solidarity union and the fall of communism, was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes festival.

In 2000, Wajda received an Academy Honorary Award in 2000, in recognition of five decades of work, the first eastern European director to win the lifetime achievement Oscar.

Wajda's films also won a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and four nominations for Academy Awards, among other prizes.

"ONE OF THE GREATEST"

"He was one of the greatest Polish artists, one of the best known in the world. Poland was his passion," film director and head of the Polish Filmmakers' Association Jacek Bromski told TVN24 broadcaster.

"For us, for the community he was a pillar of strength, everybody gathered around him. He was always present in the life of the film-making community, he was a mentor, a paragon."

Wajda's last film, "Afterimage," a biopic about avant-garde painter Wadysaw Strzemiski, tells a story of an artist struggling to overcome the pressures of Stalinist dogma on art shortly after World War Two.

Wajda, who has spent decades using subtle cinematic language and hidden meanings to avoid overt clashes with the communist authorities, has drawn parallels between Strzemiski's efforts and the current conservative government's policy of promoting "national culture."

"We are facing a moment when the authorities are trying to influence art," Wajda, who has criticized the Law and Justice (PiS) government on several occasions, told the local PAP news agency in September.

"'National art' is being discussed, what is art and what isn't. I made a film about the past which says that influencing art is not the role of a government. Artists should do art, not the authorities."

"Afterimage" has been submitted as Poland's candidate for best Foreign Language Oscar. (Reporting by Marcin Goettig; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Polish film director and recipient of an Academy Honorary Award Andrzej Wajda dies at the age of 90.