Berlin International Film Festival 2000

Nick Roddick, Moving Pictures veteran interviewer, will be interviewing the well-known and the budding new talent, as well as the other key players at this 50th Berlinale edition.

Why is it always with the film-makers you most admire that the biggest obstacles crop up? The road to the, er, 'creative' team of Inspector Gadget (for instance) is likely to be a smooth boulevard with publicists easing you along every inch: cups of coffee, complimentary Coke, lavish notes and lunches. The road to Andrzej Wajda and Pan Tadeusz, however, turns out to be a mountain track filled with potholes.

Incredibly for a film that has been seen by over six million people in Poland and is screening here as a special tribute to its director, who received a special lifetime achievement award from the Berlinale the other night Pan Tadeusz has no publicist. There is just Daniela, a very helpful lady from the French production company, Les Films du Losange. Which may be why, while Sabine, the photographer, and I sit on the sixth floor of the Hyatt, Mr Wajda and his long-time collaborator and interpreter, Jagoda Engelbrecht, wait in the lobby.

When we finally link up, there is the question of language. Jagoda wants to translate Mr Wajda's answers into German. I hold out for English. Daniela tries to sort it out. Meanwhile, we trail through the crowded, surprisingly tatty fairground atmosphere of the Hyatt lobby in search of a quiet spot.

Mr Wajda, unfailingly polite, gives the impression of having seen all this before. Eventually, we start, with Jagoda doing a more than creditable job of translating into English. I notice her hands are shaking. Sorry, Jagoda.

I start with a question about Polish national identity, which was an underlying theme in Wajda's classic fifties trilogy, Generation, Canal and Ashes And Diamonds. It was likewise a theme in the Solidarity era movies, Man Of Marble and Man Of Iron. They were films as much about the whole Eastern European experience Sabine, who grew up in the DDR, says they meant a lot to her as they were about Poland.

But Pan Tadeusz, taken from the epic 19th-century poem by Adam Mickiewicz, is the work that defined the Polish identity, linguistically and culturally, in a way that few books have done in any country. It is an investigation of national identity in spades.

So is Wajda exploring familiar territory from a new angle?

"Yes," he says, "but Poland is another place now. In the last few years, American movies have been pushing every Polish film out of Polish cinemas, and I think that the audience wanted to see a Polish film about a Polish subject about Polish tradition, Polish roots and Polish national identity.

"Pan Tadeusz has been a real évènement," he uses the French word (much as, in a set of quotation marks, he uses the English word "freedom" to describe the end of Communism) "which I think will have some results in the future. The interesting thing is that the film is not

contemporary, and that not one contemporary film has had that kind of success. Audiences wanted to go back to another world, to be children again. That's interesting, because it means it must have some purpose, some sociological or psychological purpose."

Might this not, I hesitantly suggest, be a kind of escapism not all that different from the one which had previously driven Polish audiences into American action movies?

"That's a good question," he says, "and I cannot give an answer. But my impression is that there is a greater need for identity now that you can leave the country whenever you want. Perhaps people are scared of getting lost in this new world. In the past, during the Communist era, we tried to define ourselves in a political sense. Now we try to find a psychological definition of our identity."

"Pan Tadeusz" is a book every Polish schoolchild knows: imagine Shakespeare merged with Molière with a hint of Mark Twain. But this could have been as much of a disadvantage as an advantage: like filmed Shakespeare, it could have been a turn-off. Six million admissions suggest otherwise, but there is also the risk of treading on national sensibilities, of failing to live up to a nation's dreams.

"I thought for three years about this subject, about whether I should do this film," says Wajda. "The audience in Poland is a very young one. They learned the book at school, but it is not the most loved today, because people associate it with school homework.

"It was the actors who told me to make this film," he continues. "These are the most successful actors in Poland, who are loved by the audience, so this was very curious for me and not very logical. But we had no such film: that was one of the points for them that the audience was waiting for something new. I think it was a good observation. They were right."

Maybe it's the translation process, but I think Mr Wajda may be avoiding this particular question, which I have now rephrased for the third time. Much the same goes for the one about the Pope, for whom there was a special screening.

"It was a very moving evening, very moving," says Wajda. "There were 15 or 20 persons there, just a small group, And I wanted, of course, that he should like the film, so I was very nervous. This poem has moved him very much, because it brought him back to his own language, and to his own country."

But did he like the film?

"You will have to ask him that," says Wajda with an enigmatic smile.

Now, that would make an interesting back-page profile... I wonder now: does the Pope have a publicist?