Ashes and Diamonds

Ashes and Diamonds is a 1958 Polish film directed by Andrzej Wajda, the final part of his war trilogy following A Generation and Kanal, set on the last day of the Second World War in Europe and following a young Home Army resistance fighter, played by Zbigniew Cybulski, ordered to assassinate an incoming communist party official. Over the course of one night the fighter is drawn toward a young woman he meets at the hotel bar, and the film stages his growing doubt about a mission whose political purpose has already been overtaken by the war's end. Ashes and Diamonds is widely regarded as the defining work of the Polish Film School and one of the most influential Eastern European films of the 1950s.