11 Facts About Aleksander Ford

Amid an anti-Semitic purge in the communist party in Poland, Ford was stopped from preparing a film on the life of a Jewish educator.

Aleksander Ford took his own life in 1980 in Naples, Florida.

Aleksander Ford made his first feature film, Mascotte in 1930, after a year of making short silent films.

Aleksander Ford did not use sound until The Legion of the Streets.

When World War II began, Aleksander Ford escaped to the Soviet Union and worked closely with Jerzy Bossak to establish a film unit for the Soviet-sponsored People's Army of Poland in the USSR.

Aleksander Ford is perhaps best remembered for directing the first postwar documentary Majdanek - cmentarzysko Europy and the feature film Knights of the Teutonic Order, based on a novel of the same name by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz.

Aleksander Ford continued making films in Poland until the 1968 Polish political crisis.

Aleksander Ford later moved to Denmark and eventually settled in the United States.

Aleksander Ford made two more feature films, both of which were commercial and critical failures.

Blacklisted by the Polish communist government as a political defector, Aleksander Ford became a non-person in contemporary discussions and analysis of Polish filmmaking.

Aleksander Ford committed suicide in a Florida hotel on 4 April 1980.