It may be little known outside cinephile circles, but Lodz's National Film, Television and Theatre School has had an extraordinary impact on the development of Polish and international cinema since it was established in 1948.
The school boasts an impressive alumni, including Roman Polanski, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Zbigniew Cybulski.
The school was also one of the lasting bastions for political dissent in Poland during the decades of authoritarian rule by the United Workers' Party, attracting independent-minded men and women from around the country.
With food shortages, bureaucratic inertia and police-state control, there was no scarcity of subjects for the aspiring filmmakers.
In The Office (1966), for example, Kieslowski - then in his second year at the school - captured the alienation of bureaucracy in a five-minute piece. His footage of people being repeatedly asked to fill in forms by indifferent staff at a government insurance agency showed the system as an inhuman machine that puts paperwork ahead of people.
Polanski's early short films pierced the respectable veneer of Polish society in more roundabout ways. In Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958, right), which won numerous awards, the men emerge from the sea with a wardrobe, which they then carry around town, attracting suspicion and distaste from passersby. It's a hilarious precursor to the crass television prank shows of today. Break Up the Party (1959), which featured thugs gatecrashing a school dance and beating up the revellers, was also allegorical.
