Many names from a new generation of Polish young film people were involved in "Zdjecia probne" (Screen Tests) including film directors, writers, and actors. So we can truly call it a manifest of the Polish young generation of the 1970s. "Screen Tests" were shown in 1977 at the Student Film Clubs in Poland and were often followed by discussions with film creators. I remember such meetings in which Agnieszka Holland and Feliks Falk took part, and this is why this film occupies a special place in my memory. Young Polish people of that time were predominantly against communism, but what could we do with Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Union right under our nose? One thing that we could do at the first step was to be open about who we are and what our ambitions are. We didn't want to hear more socialist propaganda or the same stories about the past wars. We were rather ready to work constructively for the future. That is also exactly what the creators of "Screen Tests" wanted to do. No one expected that in a couple of years Brezhnev would be replaced with open-minded Mikhail Gorbachev or that the Polish "Solidarity" movement would be created and the Berlin Wall would collapse. The plot of "Screen Tests" is about the first steps into adulthood of two high school graduates, Anka (Daria Trefankowska) and Pawel (Andrzej Pieczynski), who meet during the test screen shots for a movie. Anka is more mature and calculating, while Pawel is uncompromising. For a collective work, the film has remarkable unity, and I can say that "Screen Tests" together with other films by Agnieszka Holland, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Feliks Falk were the voice of our generation. We needed a change and some hope for the future. Even when taking part in the discussions, we saw that there were many of us, which gave us some hope. So today I can regard Paris, Berlin, and London as my favorite cities in Europe, the same way as I regard Warsaw, Cracow, and Gdansk my favorite cities in Poland. But there is a knowledge that we owe this fact to the collective work of many good and sensible people in various European countries and in the United States.
