When the film opened in New York City at $25 a ticket, it caused a commotion on the Upper East Side, the lines stretching around the block. Throughout his career, Wajda, now 74 years old, the director of 40 plus feature films and the son of a Polish officer murdered by the Soviets at Katyn, has chosen, to create movies speaking to the Polish spirit and condition. There have been few exceptions.

In discussing this in an interview with Brendan Lemon of the New York Times, Wajda, Poland foremost film-maker, quoted Rousseau, the Swiss-born philosopher who, in 1771, counseled the Poles facing mighty and rapacious neighbors "You cannot prevent them from swallowing you, so you should at least make sure they don't digest you."

That advice was also followed, in his time, by the author of the poem, Adam Mickiewicz. Cast in prison for political activity by the Russians, then banished to central Russia for five years, he chose, following the unsuccessful uprising of 1831, to go into exile in Paris. A fervent Polish patriot to the end, it was in Paris that he wrote Pan Tadeusz as an evocation of his homeland. Stifled and suppressed in occupied Poland, the country's literature thus flourishes abroad. The first line of the poem, in which Mickiewicz likens his homeland to health, the value of which no one fully perceives until it has been lost, articulates eloquently the pain that wave after wave of Polish émigrés have felt in their hearts. For them, his narrative poem recreated the lost homeland in verse. Wajda has transferred it to the more modern medium of the film.

The film carries no political message; in an interview with Paweł Goźliński, Wajda explicitly stated that, that though during the times of the Soviet-imposed communist regime it was the duty of artists to express what could not be said publicly, now that Poland is a sovereign and functioning democracy, that is no longer their role, since those expressions of opinion occur quite properly in the voting booth.

Napoleon's Army on its way to Moscow

Pan Tadeusz, Adam Mickiewicz's book length narrative poem on which the film is based, is one of the greatest works of the 19th Century's Romantic Period. It's a love story, set in the luscious Lithuanian countryside, known simply by the name of the young lover, Thaddeus, Pan being a Polish form of address which falls in between Mister and Sir, but is neither. The rollicking tale, which involves feats, hunts, aristocratic feuds, balls and battles, is set in the year 1811-1812. The story weaves around the central theme - the hope of liberation of partitioned Poland. That hope is awakened in Polish hearts by Napoleon and his spectacular string of military successes.