Ziemia obiecana (1978)

Andrzej Wajda's four-part 1978 television version of his own film, The Promised Land. Karol Borowiecki, an engineer at a textile factory in booming Łódź, sets out with two friends, a German and a Jew, to build a factory of their own, and Wajda shows the dirty, dangerous factories and the ruthless money behind them with no romance at all. Where most entries here are about the workers, this is the clearest portrait of the capitalists who made the boom and what it cost everyone below them. It comes from Władysław Reymont's novel, and the film behind it was nominated for an Oscar. Expect Polish with subtitles and a bleak view of ambition.