The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) / Saragossamanuskriptet

At the height of the Napoleonic wars, a Polish soldier seeks refuge in a deserted house in the Spanish town of Saragossa, and discovers a mysterious manuscript written in a language he doesn’t speak. When enemy Spanish officers arrive to arrest him, one of the soldiers realises that the book appears to tell the story of his grandfather, Alfonse Van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski, Ashes and Diamonds), and his surreal, mystical adventures in the region several decades before. He starts to translate the text for the Polish soldier, and so begins a time-shifting, genre-hopping, ouroboros-like epic narrative, one that blends the gothic, quixotic and erotic, and in the process interrogates the very nature of storytelling itself. Championed by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, The Saragossa Manuscript has grown in status since its initial release from a cult oddity to a film widely regarded as one of greatest ever produced in Poland, and a work that cemented Wojciech Has as one of European cinema’s most visionary and idiosyncratic directors.