By the time the opposition movement Solidarność (“Solidarity”) burst onto the Polish political scene in August 1980, Andrzej Wajda had been one of the country’s leading film directors for more than two decades. Films like Ashes and Diamonds and The Promised Land had won Wajda an international reputation and thrust Polish filmmaking to the forefront of European cinema as it experienced a golden age.

But nothing could compare to the impact of Wajda’s Man of Marble (1977) and its 1981 sequel, Man of Iron. The first movie anticipated — and contributed to — the rise of Solidarity, while the second documented the movement’s triumphal emergence, before the coup of December 1981 that drove it underground.

Three decades later, after returning from exile in France, Wajda revisited the subject of working-class opposition to Polish Communism with 2013’s Wałęsa: Man of Hope, completing a trilogy that sheds a great deal of light on modern Polish history. The films stand to this day as a landmark of European cinema, whose political impact may never be surpassed.