The last feature of the late, great director Andrzej Wajda, one of the titans of European cinema, Afterimage is a poignant and enraging story about injustice; about the destruction of an individual by totalitarianism. Set in post-World War II Communist Poland, it portrays a world in which beauty, art and artistic integrity are persecuted.

The protagonist is the charismatic painter and author Wladyslaw Strzemiński, a legend of modern art. He was the most famous of the Polish formalists before World War II, and a co-creator of a unique avant-garde art collection in Lodz, where he was a popular professor at the Higher School of Plastic Arts. Afterimage (the title referring to one of his revolutionary theories) traces his outspoken resistance to the social realism sanctioned by the Stalinist regime as the only accepted artistic style and how he suffers for his principles.

"Another significant chapter in Polish history from Wajda, a somber portrait of a Polish artist who, unlike his portraitist here, was defeated by the fickle shifts of political ideology imposed on art." Dennis Harvey, Variety