Made in 1945, We Are Building Warsaw is a morale-booster for a city and people devastated by war. However, since reconstruction had only just begun, most of the film documents Warsaw's devastation. The opening—influenced by Sergei Eisenstein?—is made in editing: archival footage of German guns being loaded, fired, planes taking off, bombing are inter-cut with defiant shots of Warsaw's Siren. She will not be destroyed; the spirit of the city will not be broken. Following is wartime carnage (Germans with flamethrowers, aerial shots of a bombed-out cityscape, massive buildings being reduced to rubble) and its effects: images like those found in post-war German and Italian films. One tracking shots reminds of the opening of Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero. Then, people enter. Hungry, numbed, without homes; but alive and ready to rebuild. Plans are drawn, workers from all over Poland converge on the capital to make it great again, brick-by-brick. Question: Is this where Socialist Poland's fascination with bricklaying began? Religious buildings are highlighted: cathedrals missing walls but with their steeples in-tact; the face of Christ; his body, untouched by bombs, cross across back, pointing the way. Poland as the Christ of nations. A similar image would re-appear thirteen years later, in Andrzej Wajda's celebrated Ashes and Diamonds. The film, as befits the topic, has no conclusion; or, perhaps more accurately, it's conclusion is actually a beginning.
Eventual problems with reconstruction are probed in later films, such as Jan Dmowski and Bohdan Kośinski's City on the Islands and Kazimierz Karabasz and Władysław Ślesicki's Where the Devil Says Goodnight.
Stanisław Urbanowicz, 1945
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