I saw "Wodzirej" (Dance Leader) at the time of its release and remember attending the meeting where the director, Feliks Falk, discussed it with the student audience. The story is well done and entertaining, with the lead part played by memorable and recently departed Jerzy Stuhr. It shows some crucial moments from the career of a cynical man who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals. So the main character has something of Mr. Ripley or George Duroy from the novel "Bel-Ami" by Guy de Maupassant. Apart from the quite engrossing main plot, we can also enjoy good acting and realism in showing everyday life in Poland in the late 1970s. But another and probably more important goal of this film was to show the corrupted society of that time. Feliks Falk, together with Krzysztof Kieslowski and Agnieszka Holland, belonged to the generation of (at that time) young and ambitious film directors that were opposed to communism. They had the courage to talk about it during the meetings with the audience but had to moderate this message in their films. These were the times of communist censorship, and some films never reached the audience. So the artists had to be careful, but people watching the movies grasped the meaning anyway. Today we can enjoy the playing of the actors that were popular at that time and see how Poland looked like some 40 years ago: the streets, interiors of the flats, and fashion in clothes. When we see on the screen the corruption that was eating Polish society at the time, we realize that we have come a long way and our life today is much better. I think that we should be grateful to the people like Feliks Falk, Agnieszka Holland, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and many others who had the courage to stand up. For me, "Wodzirej" is one of the most important Polish movies of the 1970s.
