The film Bohdan Zynoviy Khmelnytsky by the Ukrainian director Mykola Mashchenko is little‑known in Poland. The director intended it to become a “bridge over the precipice” which divides both nations, but from the very beginning it was negatively perceived both by the audience and critics. The Ukrainian reception of Jerzy Hoffman’s With Fire and Sword, a movie referring to the same events from a common past, seems to be completely different entity. The work by the Polish artist remains of interest even twenty years after its release. The article is an attempt to determine the reasons for this situation. The author analyzes the artistic values of Mashchenko’s film, the characters’ performances and historiosophy, and, comparing those with Hoffman’s screening, looks for an answer to the question as to the motives for the contrasting reception of these films by Ukrainian society.

Andrzej Wajda’s films are interesting and serious historical narratives, which enter in dialog both with academic historiography and with other forms of familiarization with the past. Some of Wajda’s historical films are part of the paradigm of the affirmative vision of history. It is a vision that focuses on creating the positive picture of the bygone world, on showing those elements of the past that a given community recognizes as glorious and heroic, worth imitating, commemorating, and honoring, which can be the object of pride or even worship. The affirma-tive vision of history belittles, leaves in the background or omits all those themes from the past that fall outside positive evaluation for various reasons and could distort a consistent favorable picture of the past of a community. In the present article I would like to examine from the comparative perspective of two films, “A Generation [ Pokolenie]” (1954) and “Katyń” (2007). The comparison between Andrzej Wajda’s two films made in the space of fifty years shows that despite the fact that the two pictures were produced in entirely different historico‑cultural contexts, using different film styles, the two screen stories present the affirmation of diametri-cally disparate versions of history, it is the dramatic strategies for and techniques of affirmation of history that remain the same in either case.