Landscape After Battle is quite possibly the definitive Polish film on the psychic ravages of the War. Set in Auschwitz after its liberation by the Allies, the film is an unlikely but completely successful blend of beautiful color images, dark humor, and documentary recreations of the painful transition from captivity in the Camps to “freedom” in the DP centers for thousands of Poles. Daniel Olbrychski plays a bookish young man who escapes the DP camp with his girl, has second thoughts, and returns - only to see her shot down by a trigger-happy guard.
“Landscape eschews rigorous realism (the freed inmates of the camp are fat, not thin) and concentrates on a timeless almost impressionistic exploration of the meaning of freedom, of nationalism, of hatred and of the inhumanity of man.” --National Film Theatre