Kanał earned Wajda the Special Jury Prize at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. The film is largely free of the overt communist propaganda that characterised its predecessor, A Generation. It was released after the fall of the Stalinist regime of Bolesław Bierut, which followed the death of Joseph Stalin. In April 2019, a restored version of the film was selected to be shown in the Cannes Classics section at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Reception While Wajda’s debut film A Generation (1955) received a measured critical response, Kanal provoked widespread controversy and debate among Poles as to its merits. Donota Niemitz and Stefan Steinberg remark that “the film was not received favorably in Poland. The futile death of the uprising’s heroes, covered in dirt and excrement, did not correspond to the idealized picture of the nation’s martyrs.” Critic Leon Buko in Dziennik polski complained “This whole Warsaw, this whole Rising wallows in filth, in the gutters of history…” Aleksander Jackiewicz, of the Trybuna ludu wrote: Biographer Boleslaw Michalek adds that Jackiewicz placed emphasis on the skeptical note in the film, its confrontation with the legend of the Warsaw Rising, and by and large this was how reviewers hailed Kanal as a landmark in Polish cinema.” On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 100% based on , with a weighted average rating of 8.1/10. Theme One of the principle thematic elements in Kanal concerns “Polish heroism” and the conceit that Poles have historically been prone to “acts of courage as futile as they are desperate.” Wajda’s initially considered referencing some celebrated - and semi-suicidal - cavalry charges in Polish history, including those during the Napoleonic era’s Battle of Samosierra, the Charge of Rokitna in WWI and the legend of the Charge at Krojanty, reputedly on German tanks in 1939. These were to be presented in a pre-credit sequence of but ultimately were abandoned. Biographer Michalek Boleslaw observes: Historic manifestations of “romanticism and heroism” were deemed anachronistic in post-war Poland and challenged by appeals to “reason” and “political common sense.” Despite these political exposures, Wajda’s romantic, sensual style” endows the characters in Kanal with “heroic dimensions.” The descent into the sewers has been compared to Dante’s depiction of the souls damned in his Inferno, and acknowledged as such by Wajda. Biographer Boleslaw Michalek writes: Political assessment The historical subject that Wajda addressed in Kanal was one of the most