The Promised Land

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This article is about "The Promised Land" film. For other uses see Promised Land (disambiguation).

Ziemia Obiecana
Polish promotional poster for the theatrical release of The Promised Land (Ziemia Obiecana)
Directed by	Andrzej Wajda
Written by	Andrzej Wajda
Starring	Daniel Olbrychski, Wojciech Pszoniak, Andrzej Seweryn
Music by	Wojciech Kilar
Cinematography	Waclaw Dybowski, Edward Klosinski, Witold Sobocinski
Editing by	Zofia Dwornik, Halina Prugar
Release date(s)	1975
Running time	179 min.
Language	Polish
IMDb profile

The Promised Land (Ziemia Obiecana) is a film made in 1975 by the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda, based on a novel by the writer Władysław Reymont.

Set in the industrial city of Łódź, The Promised Land tells the story of a Pole, a German, and a Jew struggling to build a factory in the raw world of 19th century capitalism.

Karol Borowiecki (Daniel Olbrychski), a Polish nobelman, is the managing engineer at the Bucholz textile factory. He plans to set up his own factory with the help of his friends Max Baum (Andrzej Seweryn), a German and heir to an old handloom factory, and Moritz Welt (Wojciech Pszoniak), an independent Jewish businessman. Borowiecki's affair with Lucy Zucker (Kalina Jedrusik), wife of another textile magnate, gives him advance notice of a change in cotton tariffs and helps Welt to make a killing on the Hamburg futures market. But more money has to be found, so all three characters cast aside their pride to raise the necessary capital.

On the day of the factory opening, Borowiecki has to deny his affair with Zucker's wife to a jealous husband. But while Borowiecki accompanies Lucy on her exile to Berlin, Zucker apparently takes his revenge by burning down the three partners' uninsured factory.

In Wajda's film, Borowiecki, the Pole, remains the most vicious and destructive character until the very end. According to Wajda, his inhuman attitude was due to circumstances: Borowiecki, being the least wealthy, had to be particularly ruthless in order to achieve success.

Wajda presents a shocking image of the city, with its dirty and dangerous factories and ostentatiously opulent residences devoid of taste and culture. The film follows in the footsteps of Charles Dickens, Émile Zola and Maxim Gorky, as well as German expressionists such as Knopf, Meidner and Grosz, who gave testimony of social protest.

1 The novel
2 Selected Cast
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] The novel

The film was adapted from Władysław Reymont's 1899 novel The Promised Land, in which he vividly painted a portrait of the rapid industrialization of Łódź and its cruel effects on workers and mill owners. "For that land people were born. And it sucked everything in, crushed it in its powerful jaws, and chewed people and objects, the sky and the earth, in return giving useless millions to a handful of people, and hunger and hardship to the whole throng," he wrote.