Wajda's film brilliantly juxtaposes the repressiveness of Stalinism in the Poland of the 1950s with that of the regime cracking down on the burgeoning Solidarity movement of the 1970s. The director frames his film around a documentary being made by film student Agnieska (Krystyna Janda) about one of Poland's forgotten working-class heroes, Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), of the 1950s. As she begins to stumble across ugly truths about the period, the powers that be start to become nervous. In his depiction of the exploitation of the naïve worker and aspiring labor leader by Stalin's propaganda machine, the director offers a savage denunciation of the foundation of lies upon which a totalitarian system is built. Focusing on the 1950s, Wajda is also pointing the finger at himself and his contemporaries for their own innocent utopianism, remaining blind to the terrible cost of Stalinism long after its evil had become clear. With the growing power of labor, and the rise of Solidarity in the 1970s, he hoped Polish audiences would draw the parallel with the earlier period, and rise up to prevent Jaruzelski from taking similar measures. So effective was the film in arousing the government's ire that it was years before he would again be allowed to make a film in his own country. Made in the style of a documentary, the genius of Wajda gives it a fresh immediacy and formal control that few documentaries could match.