As events have shown, it was the right way.”During the early 1970s, Wajda himself made a series of films less directly concerned with political questions, often with a wistful, lyrical tone that revealed his painterly eye. (As a young man, he trained as an artist.) Among these was The Birchwood (1970), the story of a forester living in the woods with his daughter and tubercular brother, and The Wedding (1973), his adaptation of Wyspianski’s magical but baffling play about the wedding of a country girl and a Cracow poet. Miss Nobody, a rites-of-passage story with a strong pastoral vein, harks back to these earlier works as much as it imitates Kieslowski. Wajda hopes it will attract a younger audience than his recent, historically-based films like The Holy Week (1996) and Korczak (1990), both set in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation “It seems to me that audiences have changed.

A new generation of viewers have come to cinema, and I thought it would be interesting for myself to try to meet this audience.”Wajda’s own wry, gloomy analysis of current Polish cinema-going habits doesn’t encourage confidence in the likely box-office success of Miss Nobody. As he sees it, while the old people stay at home watching TV, young Poles turn up at the movies in search of spectacle and entertainment. “They’re so accustomed to seeing big-budget American movies that, when they watch a Polish film, they can’t understand why the effects are so modest; why the overall impression of the film is so low-key.”Nowadays, Hollywood, not “the Party”, sets the agenda in Polish film culture. Wajda points out that the country has only 800 cinemas, serving a population of 38 million. “They’re screening more than 250 films a year and over 200 are US films! Practically speaking, it is very difficult to find any room for European or specifically Polish productions – especially as the distributors are getting the American movies almost for free.” The Americans, he points out, spend as much or more in publicising films than the Poles do in making them.Early on in our interview, Wajda spills a cup of coffee on his immaculately laundered shirt. He pulls over the lapel of his jacket, trying to conceal the mark, but his annoyance is evident. When he begins to rail against the effects of Hollywood hegemony on his nation’s film culture, he keeps on glancing down at the stain as it seeps ever outward.”One group of young Polish film-makers believes the only way to win audiences is to try by all means possible to imitate Hollywood.

To some extent, they are successful: films which follow American patterns are the only ones that make any money at the box-office. But another group of young film-makers have come to the opposite conclusion: if the only way they can win an audience is to follow the American model, they forget about the audience altogether.”Wajda isn’t especially interested in either alternative. He doesn’t want to make ersatz Hollywood movies but nor does he have any desire to retreat into some obscure, hermetic world of his own. He sounds almost nostalgic as he compares his predicament more than 40 years ago with the choices facing the new generation “Our choices were primarily political.