SOURCE: "Frozen Assets: Interviews on Polish Cinema," in Sight and Sound, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 86-91.

In the following excerpt, Kieslowski discusses the impact of political changes on the film industry in Poland and how politics have affected his own work.

Living in Poland now is to participate in momentous events which are, at the time of writing (January 1981), still in turmoil, although not quite the chaotic mess that the Soviet bloc media would have the West believe. The independent trade organisation (union is not an adequate term to describe a network of combined worker and intellectual groups which now conservatively account for ten million people) Solidarity exerts a discipline over its affiliated sub-sections which gives a coherent structure and aim to a nation which has progressively declined in moral hope and social cohesion since the first defeat of working class aspiration to democratic representation in 1956.

Since that...