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. 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. 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. 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 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’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. 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. 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 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. It was only after the fall of communism in 1989 that he was able to make his film about Katyn. 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.
Polish film director and recipient of an Academy Honorary Award Andrzej Wajda dies at the age of 90.