Andrzej Munk was born in Kraków. Shortly before the World War II (in June 1939), he finished his gymnasium. During the German occupation of Poland he moved to Warsaw, where he was forced to hide because of his partially Jewish ancestry. Using a false name, he worked as a construction worker. In 1944 Munk took part in the Warsaw Uprising. After the capitulation, he managed to leave the city and move to Kraków and then to Kasprowy Wierch, where he started working as a janitor at the rope-way station.
After the war ended, Munk returned to Warsaw. He joined the reopened Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology. Because of poor health he left the university and later studied law at the Warsaw University. Finally he moved to Łódź, where he joined the Łódź Film and Theatre School. He graduated in 1951 and started working as a cameraman for the Polska Kronika Filmowa (Polish Film Chronicle). In this period Munk finished several short films and documents. In 1948 he joined the PZPR, but in 1952 was expelled for "blameworthy behaviour".
In 1956 he finished "Man on the Tracks" (Człowiek na torze), one of the most important Polish films of the 1950's. The following year he started giving lectures at his alma mater. In 1957 he finished "Heroism" (Eroica), a set of two film novels on the Polish idea of heroism and virtue. In 1960 Munk finished his third film, "Bad Luck" (Zezowate szczęście), a tragicomical story of a Polish everyman who always finds himself in the wrong place and in the wrong time.
Since 1965 the Łódź Film School awards the best debutant with the Andrzej Munk Film Award. During the 2001 Biennale di Venezia a retrospective festival of his films was organized in Venice.
A contemporary of Andrzej Wajda, filmmaker AndrzejMunk, who may well have gained an equally international reputation had he not died in an automobile wreck in 1961, was a key figure in Polish New Wave cinema, noted for his intelligent and ironic views of life in modern Poland.
Born in Cracow, Munk was a freedom fighter in the Polish underground during WWII.
Munk began directing feature films in 1956 and quickly established a reputation for fearlessly taking sharp, satiric pokes at the bureaucratic Communist regime, particularly in regards to the notion of military valor.
AndrzejMunkÂ’s tragic death at age thirty-nine might have formed the plot for one of his own darkly sardonic works: a Polish Jew and an active resistance worker during the war, he was returning home from shooting his film Passenger at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1961 when an oncoming truck struck his car.
Munk’s cinema—often compared to the literature of his compatriot Witold Gombrowicz—showcases the ways in which ordinary people go about making sense of extraordinary times; and if sense can not be found, his films imply, then absurdity and satire should take its place.
Munk garnered international recognition with this breakthrough film, a poignant satire on the vagaries of heroism in wartime and “the bitter irony of Polish fate.” The work is presented in two parts.
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