Man of Marble
Saturday, November 21, 2026 at 11:15 AM
Music Box Theatre
screening
An aggressive documentary filmmaker fights present-day 1970s government censorship as she seeks the truth about bricklayer Matuesz Birkut, a state-manufactured proletariat hero during the Soviet-controlled 1950s. Fourteen years in the making, MAN OF MARBLE is a film-within-a-film that blends documentary, pseudo-documentary, and fictional techniques that inevitably draw comparison to CITIZEN KANE. Like Orson Welles' masterpiece, MAN OF MARBLE is a reflection on national history and mythology and also on the very nature of filmmaking. It also turned out to prophesize the worker strikes of 1980 and the rise of the Solidarity movement. Directed by Andrzej Wajda. 1977. 161 min. Polish with English subtitles.