Ford, a self-identified Communist, used his films to "express social messages on the screen," as in his documentaries: the award-winning Legion ulicy, (The Street Legion, 1932), Children Must Laugh (1936) and the postwar Eighth Day of the Week (1958) rejected by the communist party censors during the Polish October. Ford continued making films in Poland until the 1968 Polish political crisis. Accused of antisocialist activity and expelled from the Communist Party, Ford emigrated to Israel where he lived for the next two years. He later moved to Denmark and eventually settled in the United States. Ford made two more feature films, both of which were commercial and critical failures. In 1973, he made a film adaptation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, a Danish-Swedish production that recounted the horrors of the Soviet gulag. In 1975 he made The Martyr, an English language, Israeli-German co-production based on the heroic story of Dr. Janusz Korczak. Blacklisted by the Polish communist government as a political defector, Ford became a non-person in contemporary discussions and analysis of Polish filmmaking. Isolated, he committed suicide in a Florida hotel on 4 April 1980.[3]
