Politics & Power Quote by Andrzej Wajda

A small industry obituary disguised as a statistic, Wajda’s “95 percent” lands less like market research than a blunt diagnosis: cultural sovereignty can be lost without a single tank crossing a border. The adverb “Suddenly” does heavy lifting. It collapses years of post-1989 upheaval into a shock cut, the kind a filmmaker would use to signal a regime change. In Wajda’s telling, the new order arrives not as censorship but as saturation - a screen takeover executed by distribution muscle, marketing, and the addictive efficiency of Hollywood storytelling.

The subtext is not anti-American so much as anti-monopoly. “Dominated” frames entertainment as an occupying force, but the real grief sits in the next line: “audiences turned away.” That’s the sting. No censor bans the old cinema; people simply stop showing up. Wajda is mourning a social contract where national films were part of public life - moral argument, historical reckoning, shared vocabulary. His own career, forged under communism’s constraints, depended on viewers trained to read allegory and to see local stories as consequential. The market era rewards different reflexes: speed, spectacle, the comfort of familiar genres.

Context matters: Poland’s transition to capitalism reorganized media ecosystems overnight. Theatrical chains, TV schedules, and ad budgets began to privilege imported product that arrived pre-sold. Wajda’s complaint is also a warning about cultural attention as infrastructure. Once the pipes belong to someone else, it’s not just “the kinds of films we used to make” that disappear; it’s the audience capable of wanting them.