Marian Opania to Receive the Marshal’s Film Award for His Role in Man of Iron

On Wednesday, the audience at the Przeźrocza Festival in Bydgoszcz watched Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Iron, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar. On Saturday, the actor who played the lead role will receive the Marshal of the Region’s Film Award.

On 5 September – the final day of the Przeźrocza Festival – Marian Opania will receive the Kujawsko-Pomorskie Region Marshal’s Film Award “for a timeless acting performance” in Man of Iron. The presentation of the Pola Negri statuette and a meeting with the actor will take place at Młyny Rothera at 3 p.m. The laureate will talk, among other things, about his role in Man of Iron and his connections with our region.

– Almost 60 years ago, Marian Opania played the scout Truchaczek in Bydgoszcz in Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski’s film Neighbours. The film reconstructs the events of the Bydgoszcz “Bloody Sunday” of September 1939, and its premiere took place in September 1969 at the Pomorzanin cinema in Bydgoszcz. Over the following decades, Marian Opania became one of Poland’s best-known film and theatre actors – the organisers of the Przeźrocza Festival recall.

Read also: Marian Opania awarded the Marshal of the Region’s Film Award

This year, the Marshal of the Region’s Film Award has already been presented to Zbigniew Suszyński, Magdalena Czerwińska and Łukasz Simlat.

Other recipients of the Marshal’s Film Award

Man of Iron is a continuation of Andrzej Wajda’s acclaimed 1976 film Man of Marble – the story of Mateusz Birkut, a socialist model worker from Nowa Huta. Five years later, the director made a film about the workers’ strike at the Gdańsk Shipyard in August 1980. “The workers’ guard at the gate recognised me immediately, and on the way to the meeting hall one of the shipyard workers said: Make a film about us… What kind? Man of Iron – he replied without hesitation. I had never made a film on commission, but I could not ignore that call,” Wajda recalled.

In Man of Iron, Birkut’s son Maciek Tomczyk (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz) is a member of the strike committee at the Gdańsk Shipyard. Radio journalist Winkel (Opania), broken by the communist system, is assigned to make a report intended to discredit Tomczyk. After arriving on the Baltic coast, the reporter gets to know the shipyard workers’ community from the inside, rebels against the authorities and sides with the strikers.

Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski wrote the screenplay in just six days, based on documents, eyewitness accounts and tape recordings. In 1981, Man of Iron became the first film in the history of Polish cinema to receive the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It was also nominated for an Oscar, but was withdrawn from the competition by the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic, who deemed it an anti-socialist film. More than 5 million viewers saw the film in Polish cinemas before 13 December 1981; afterwards, it disappeared from screens.

The audience at the Przeźrocza Festival in Bydgoszcz watched Wajda’s film on 2 September at Kino Orzeł.

Dariusz Czołgowski
Department of Promotion

4 September 2026