Polish writer/director Aleksander Ford's Eighth Day of the Week takes an astonishing anti-Communist stance--the first of many that would compel Ford to leave his homeland after a general governmental crackdown on personal expression in 1968. Zbigniew Cybulski and Sonja Ziemann play a married couple who fall through the cracks of Red bureaucracy in Warsaw. The film does not endeavor to preach, merely to present a matter-of-fact glance at how little the individual matters when confronted with mountains of red tape. Upon its completion in 1958, the government refused to allow Eighth Day of the Week to be shown in Poland; it would not been seen anywhere until its European release one year later. According to the editors of Blockbuster Guide to Movies and Video, most existing prints have been dubbed into GermanPolish filmmaker Aleksander Ford played a key role in establishing his country's international reputation for excellent cinema. One of Ford's proteges was perhaps the world's best-respected Polish director, Andrzej Wajda. After a year of making short silent films, Ford made his first feature-length film, Mascotte/Mascot, in 1930. He did not use sound until his sophomore effort, Legion Ulicy/The Legion of the Street (1932). When World War II erupted, Ford went to the Soviet Union to work closely with Jerzy Bossak and establish the film unit for the Polish military. After the war, Ford headed the government-controlled Film Polski. An opponent of the communist takeover of Poland, Ford attempted to use his films to voice his discontent and expose the effects of the new regime upon Jews and the poor, as in his documentaries Droga Mlodych/Street of the Young (1936) and the award-winning Osmy Dzien Tygodnia/Eighth Day of the Week (1959). Both films were banned in Poland. Ford continued making films in Poland until a resurgence of anti-Semitism during the 1960s led him to spend two years in Israel. Ford later lived in Denmark and eventually settled in the U.S.A.