The Grand Prize winner at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, Andrzej Wajda's MAN OF IRON is more than a great film, it is an event. For the first time, a director has been successful in making an instant record of recent history effectively explaining the course of events in Poland over the last year. One of the few satisfying fusions of fiction with documentary (we see Lech Walesa in newsreel footage and as an actor), it is an accurate depiction of the turbulent co-existence of labor, the Catholic Church, and Communism.