About

You can watch Ashes and Diamonds (1958) for free on Kanopy.

A young academy soldier, Maciek Chelmicki, is ordered to shoot the secretary of the KW PPR. A coincidence causes him to kill someone else. Meeting face to face with his victim, he gets a shock. He faces the necessity of repeating the assassination. He meets Krystyna, a girl working as a barmaid in the restaurant of the "Monopol" hotel. His affection for her makes him even more aware of the senselessness of killing at the end of the war. Loyalty to the oath he took, and thus the obligation to obey the order, tips the scales.

A young soldier finds himself caught between a fatal political assignment and a sudden, inconvenient spark of humanity. This noir-soaked portrait of post-war Poland captures the agonizing friction between duty and the desperate desire to simply live.

Trailer