Playing at various venues across London until 5 April, the 15th Kinoteka Polish Film Festival pays a special homage to the late Andrzej Wajda, whose final feature is one of many new releases on show, along with a range of talks and discussions, live music events and art exhibitions. A special treat is a closing night celebration of Polish animation that has been curated by the art rock sextet British Sea Power and features such landmark titles as Walerian Borowczyk's School (1958), Stefan Schabenbeck's Stairs (1968), Daniel Szczechura's Journey (1970), Zofia Oraczewska's Banquet (1976), Zbigniew Rybczynski's Tango (1980) and Piotr Dumala's Little Black Riding Hood (1983).

Among the pictures on offer is Jan P. Matuszynski's The Last Family, which was reviewed in the 10/11/2016 In Cinemas column. Also in the New Polish Cinema Strand are the latest outings of three major Polish film-makers. Janusz Majewski harks back to the 1950s for Eccentrics, The Sunny Side of the Street, which reveals how bandleader Maciej Stuhr and singer Natalia Rybicka get swept away by the trappings of success when their swing band becomes an overnight sensation. However, the mood is much more solemn in Ryszard Bugajski's Blindness, which switches between 1953 and 1962 to recall the fateful meetings between Polish Primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (Marek Kalita), and Julia Prajs Brystygier (Maria Mamona), the sadistic Stalinist head of the Ministry of Information's infamous Department V, which was charged with persecuting the Catholic clergy.

Michal Rosa also retreats back in time for Happiness of the World, which is set in his native Silesia in the summer of 1939 and centres on the relationships that develop when Warsaw journalist Karolina Gruszka goes in search of a guidebook writer and finds lodgings in the tenement building that's home to eccentric botanist Krzysztof Stroinski, maths genius-cum-bellboy Dariusz Chojnacki, lounge lizard Przemyslaw Bluszcz and teenager Mateusz Lickindorf and his domineering mother, Agata Kulesza. Made a year before the Nazi invasion, Jozef Lejtes's Kosciuszko at the Battle of Raclawice (1938) commemorates one of the greatest victories in Polish military history, when Tadeusz Kosciuszko (Tadeusz Bialoszczynski) - a veteran of the American War of Independence, who died 200 years ago this October - fought back against the partition of his homeland by leading a force including some 2000 peasants from Lesser Poland against the vastly superior forces of the Russian tsarina, Catherine the Great, on 4 April 1794. Damning evidence that Poland has found the transition to post-Communist freedom difficult is provided by Bartosz M. Kowalski in Playground, which draws on the 1993 James Bulger case to show how tweenagers Nicolas Pryzgoda and Przemek Balinski take pitiless advantage of self-harming classmate Michalina Swistun on the last day of school. The mood is a good deal lighter in Tomasz Szafranski's Adventurers' Club, which follows the efforts of 12 year-old Franciszek Dziduch and his eccentric uncle, Bogdan Kalus, to find a chest that contains vital clues to the whereabouts of the treasure buried by their grandfather during the Second World War. And Mitja Okorn also keeps things like in Planet Single, as talk-show host Maciej Stuhr offers to show introverted music teacher Agnieszka Wiedlocha how to be more confident around men. But just as he realises he is falling for her himself, she meets the man of her dreams on an online dating site.

A real-life charmer is profiled by documentarist Hubert Woroniecki in Casablancas: The Man Who Loved Women, which recalls how New Yorker John Casablancas founded Elite Model Management in Paris in 1972 and introduced the fashion world to the concept of supermodels. Another venerable institution is lauded by Janusz Zaorski in Generations, which marks the achievement of the Feature Film Studios in reflecting the turbulent history of Poland through the 450 titles produced by such titans as Andrzej Wajda, Sylwester Checinski, Wojciech Has, Kazimierz Kutz, Roman Polanski, Wojciech Marczewski, Agnieszka Holland, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Zanussi.

While she was making the Oscar-nominated documentary short, The Children of Leningradsky (2005), Hanna Polak began filming Yulia, a young girl who survived by foraging on the Svalka, the biggest rubbish dump in Europe, which is situated just 13 miles from the Kremlin. Now, after 14 years, Polak has pieced together Yulia's hand-to-mouth existence in Something Better to Come and used it to comment on Vladimir Putin's fortunes during the same period. While Polak comes from Katowice, Marcin Koszalka from Kracow and Kinoteka accompanies his debut feature with a handful of his acclaimed documentaries.

Forming part of an autobiographical trilogy with It'll Be All Right (2004) and Let's Run Away From Her (2010), Such a Nice Boy I Gave Birth To (1999) charts his prickly relationship with his parents, who subjected him to frequent tongue lashing even as his film-making reputation began to grow. The employees of a funeral parlour in Kedzierzyn-Kozle and a crematorium in Czech Ostrava are profiled in User-Friendly Death (2006), while the bond between a 53 year-old psychiatrist and his mother is examined in Till It Hurts (2009), which formed part of the Decalogue After The Decalogue shorts cycle. And concluding the selection is Declaration of Immortality (2010), a tribute to the renowned mountaineer, `Mad' Piotr Korczak.

Koszalka moved into dramatic features with The Red Spider, which takes its title from the nickname of Poland's most notorious serial killer, Lucian Staniak, who was so known because he reputedly sent taunting letters to the police written in his own blood. However, Koszalka bases his story on the crimes of Karol Kot, the 19 year-old mass murderer who was known as `The Vampire of Krakow' in the 1960s. But this is less a biopic than a study in psychotic motivation and the paranoia generated by authoritarianism, as Filip Plawiak plays a medical student and champion diver who becomes convinced that vet Adam Woronowicz has killed a young boy at the carnival.

The sole female film-maker on show at Kinoteka 15 is the pioneering Wanda Jakubowska, who was one of the founders of the START group that did so much to shake up Polish cinema in the 1930s. Having collaborated with Eugeniusz Cekalski and Jerzy Zarzycki on two of the Reportaze (1932) shorts that owed much to Dziga-Vertov's Kino Eye newsreels, Jakubowska teamed with Cekalski on the cine-poem Sea (1933) and the montage documentary, We Are Building (1934), which addressd housing situation. However, she struck out alone with the lyrical snapshot, Edison Street (1937), before embarking upon her first feature, On the Banks of the Niemen (1939). This was produced by the Co-operative of Film Authors, but the only copy of this adaptation of novel by the feminist writer Eliza Orzeszkowa was destroyed by the Nazis after the fall of Warsaw.

Arrested in 1942 for serving with the resistance, Jakubowska spent time in Ravensbrück and Auschwitz before being released in January 1945. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that four of her wartime films deal with the concentration camps, with The Last Stage (1948), Encounters in the Dark (1960), The End of the World (1964) and Invitation (1985) all deserving to be much better known. However, while the children's films, Atlantic Story (1955) and King Macius I (1958), retain a certain cachet, Jakubowska has largely been forgotten because she proved such a staunch supporter of the Communist cause in such socialist realist sagas as Soldier of Victory (1953), Farewell to the Devil (1957), Contemporary Society (1960), Express Production Line (1965), 150 Kilometres Per Hour (1971) and White Mazerka (1978). Consequently, her work was deemed ideologically unsound after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and she remained pretty much out of favour until her death at the age of 90 in 1998.

Two of Jakubowska's wartime features are showing here. Conceived with German Communist Gerda Schneider while they were still in Auschwitz, The Last Stage was one of the first films to broach the taboo topic of the Holocaust. It centres on Barbara Drapinska, a Polish Jew who works as a translator, and her relationships with Russian doctor Tatjana Gorecka and German nurse Antonina Górecka, Gypsy singer Zofia Mrozowska, French patriot Huguette Faget, nursing aide Mariya Vinogradova, teenage miscarriage sufferer Wanda Bartówna, Serbian prisoner Alina Janowska, pharmacist's wife Halina Drohocka and women's block superintendant Aleksandra Slaska.

Adapted from a novel by Stanislawa Fleszarowa-Muskat, Encounters in the Dark follows pianist Zofia Slaboszowska as she travels back to the West German town where she worked as a slave labourer in a factory during the war. She is keen to find owner Horst Drinda and his assistant, Erik Franz, as they had tried to help the women workers by smuggling them food and medicine. However, she discovers that Franz is on trial for stealing boots so that enemies of the Reich could escape.

The war also had an indelible impact on Andrzej Wajda. The son of a cavalry officer who was killed in an early phase of the conflict, Wajda joined the Resistance as a teenager. He planned to become a painter and spent three years at the Fine Arts Academy in Krakow before transferring to the newly founded Lódz State Film School in 1950.

Drawing on his wartime experiences, he made an immediate international impact with his `lost generation' trilogy. A Generation (1954) is a solemn tale of love, patriotism and Party unity that was as much influenced by personal zeal as the Socialist Realism that the Polish state expected of its film-makers. Yet, for all its naiveté, the story of woodworker Tadeusz Lomnicki becoming involved with the Underground, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Communist agenda through his passion for Urszula Modrzynska had a strong visual sense and a humanist commitment that was to become Wajda's trademark.

Recreating incidents from the last days of the Warsaw Uprising, Kanal (1956) won the Special Jury prize at Cannes. Benefiting from Roman Mann's claustrophobic art direction and Jerzy Lipman's unrelenting photography, this harrowing adaptation of Jerzy Stefan Stawinski's short story stars Wienczyslaw Glinski as the lieutenant who gets cut off from his comrades in September 1944 and leads his 43 men into the city sewers to avoid the German onslaught. With echoes of Dante's Inferno reverberating around the network of tunnels, the symbolism is occasionally overwrought. But there's no doubting the oppressive atmosphere or the simple heroism of the partisans as they strive to suppress their growing desperation.

However, Wajda saved the best for last, as Ashes and Diamonds (1958), his adaptation of Jerzy Andrzejewski's study of corrupted idealism, remains one of the finest war films ever made. Set on the final day of the conflict, the action centres on guerilla Zbigniew Cybulski, as he debates where to draw the line between military duty and moral responsibility after he is ordered to assassinate a Communist leader whose views he despises, but whose integrity he admires. Whether romancing barmaid Ewa Krzyzanowska, struggling to come to terms with political factionalism or paying bitterly for his indecision, Cybulski so excelled that he was hailed as the Polish James Dean. But it was Wajda's mastery of location, symbolism, characterisation and camera technique that makes this an enduring work of art as well as a compelling drama.

Wajda struck a lighter tone with Innocent Sorcerers (1960), which boasts cameos by Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski (who co-wrote the screenplay) and has a nouvelle vague feel to its story about hedonist sports doctor and part-time jazz drummer Tadeusz Lomnicki. He dumps model girlfriend Wanda Koczewska at the Mannequin Club run by Krystyna Stypulkowska (who is beloved of his best pal, Zbigniew Cybulski), only to fall for bohemian out-of-towner Krystyna Stypulkowska. However, by the time he realises that she is too switched on to fall for his patented lothario act and is quite prepared to beat him at his own mind games, she has disappeared.

Despite being prepared to experiment, Wajda was always comfortable handling traditional narratives like The Promised Land (1975), which was adapted from a novel by Nobel laureate Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont. Indeed, there's something Dickensian about the trials and tribulations facing manager Daniel Olbrychski, financier Wojciech Pszoniak and German aristocrat Andrzej Seweryn as they pool their talents and resources to open a textile factory at the turn of the last century.

Yet while the epic scale suited him, Wajda was also a capable miniaturist and he demonstrated an elegiac side in The Maids of Wilko (1979), a melancholic adaptation of a Chekhovian story by Jaroslav Iwaszkiewicz. Set in the late 1920s, the action follows Daniel Olbrychski on a convalescent return to the rural estate where he enjoyed an idyllic summer before the Great War, only to discover that the object of his youthful affection has died, while her five sisters (like himself disillusioned and jaded by the passage of time) had always adored him from afar.

However, there was little room for such bittersweet lyricism in the Cinema of Moral Anxiety that was launched by Man of Marble (1977), in which Krakow documentarist Krystyna Janda discovers that bricklayer Jerzy Radziwilowicz was hailed as a hero of the people in the 1950s until he began to use his power to campaign for a workers' paradise and was airbrushed out of history. Expertly manufacturing `contemporary' newsreel footage and combining the talking-head style of Citizen Kane with the polemics of Jean-Luc Godard, Wajda brilliantly uses the tragedy of Mateusz Birkut (the Stakhanovite who was destroyed when he became too popular) to comment on the power of the Party, the transience of reputation and the veracity of visual evidence, while also exposing the difficulties of making worthwhile cinema by having Janda battle to complete and exhibit her film, following its suppression on the pretext of exceeding its budget.

In 1981, Wajda won the Palme d'or for the semi-sequel, Man of Iron, in which Janda returns to the documentary fray to chart the career of her husband, a Solidarity leader and the son of her subject in Man of Marble. But the primary focus falls on Marian Opania, as a broken-down reporter whose mission to spy on the rebellious Gdansk shipworkers is undermined by his growing politicisation. Capturing history in the making and neatly weaving it into his fictional saga, Wajda conveys the optimism of Lech Walesa's working-class heroes without losing a sense of perspective.

Finally, Kinoteka presents Wajda's final feature before he passed away at the age of 90 on 9 October 2016. Exploring the difficulty artists faced in being true to themselves without falling foul of the Party, Afterimage is a sombre, sincere paean to painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski (Boguslaw Linda), the Soviet-trained avant-gardist who (despite losing an arm and a leg in the Great War) introduced Constructivism to his students at the School of Visual Arts in Lodz in the 1920s. However, his marriage to sculptress Katarzyna Kobro (Aleksandra Justa) is on the rocks by the time the Red Army liberates Poland from the Nazis and his professional reputation begins to suffer when he refused to denounce abstraction after the Communists come to power in Warsaw and embrace the approved tenets of socialist realism. Thus, he suffers the indignity of seeing his finest works locked away or destroyed and he is forced to eke out a living as a sign painter while neglecting daughter Nika (Bronislawa Zamachowska) and spurning adoring student, Hania (Zofia Wichlacz).