10 Best Movies Set in or About Poland

10 Movies Set in or About Poland

Foreign-led films whose sustained setting or subject remains centered on Poland.

1. 

   1. Schindler's List

   1993

   In Nazi-occupied Poland, a profiteering German businessman gradually risks his fortune and his life to save more than a thousand Jewish workers from extermination in the death camps. Steven Spielberg's shattering, Oscar-winning masterpiece based on a true story.

   Why & details

   Curator’s note: A Krakow and Holocaust story centered on German occupation of Poland.

2. 

   2. Shoah

   1985

   Over nine and a half hours built entirely from present-day interviews and no archival footage, Claude Lanzmann's monumental documentary gathers the testimony of survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators of the Holocaust. An overwhelming, essential work.

   Why & details

   Curator’s note: A Holocaust documentary centered heavily on occupied Poland, extermination sites, and testimony.

3. 

   3. The Pianist

   2002

   A gifted Jewish pianist in Warsaw survives the horrors of the Nazi occupation and the ghetto, hiding and scavenging alone amid the ruins as his world is destroyed around him. Roman Polanski's harrowing, Oscar-winning drama based on a true memoir.

   Why & details

   Curator’s note: A predominantly French-led international production offers an outsider interpretation of Władysław Szpilman and occupied Warsaw.

4. 

   4. To Be or Not to Be

   1942

   In Nazi-occupied Warsaw, a troupe of hammy actors is swept into a dangerous game of espionage and impersonation to thwart a German spy and protect the resistance. Ernst Lubitsch's brilliant, daring wartime comedy.

5. 

   5. Distant Lights

   Lichter · 2003

   Along the fraught border between Germany and Poland, a mosaic of interlocking stories follows migrants, smugglers, and locals caught up in the desperate, human dramas of crossing over. A quietly powerful ensemble film.

6. 

   6. Promise at Dawn

   La Promesse de l'aube · 2017

   From a Polish childhood through youth in Nice and hardship as a wartime pilot, this exuberant tragicomedy traces the life of the writer Romain Gary and his fierce, larger-than-life mother, whose boundless faith shaped his destiny. Adapted from his memoir.

7. 

   7. The Zookeeper's Wife

   2017

   Based on a true story, the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo secretly shelter hundreds of Jews in the animal enclosures and tunnels beneath their grounds during the Nazi occupation. A moving wartime drama.

8. 

   8. Teefa in Trouble

   2018

   A charming Lahore street tough is hired to abduct the daughter of a wealthy Pakistani expatriate from Poland so she can be married off, but the job goes sideways and the two end up on the run together. A high-energy Pakistani action-comedy.

9. 

   9. Jakob the Liar

   1999

   In a Polish ghetto in 1944, a Jewish shopkeeper who overhears a scrap of hopeful news invents an imaginary hidden radio, spinning comforting lies about the war's progress to keep his neighbors' hope — and lives — alive. A bittersweet tragicomedy.

10. 

    10. Sobibor

    Собибор · 2018

    Based on a true story, a Soviet-Jewish soldier imprisoned in the Sobibór death camp in occupied Poland leads his fellow inmates in planning and carrying out the only successful mass uprising and escape from a Nazi extermination camp. A harrowing war drama.