In the mid-1940s, a new political and social order was imposed on Bulgaria and Poland. The Communist power base used the events to build a myth of its origins and to legitimise actions aimed at a profound and radical  reconstruction of the state apparatus. The centrally controlled narrative of events during the first half of the 1940s also found its expression in numerous film productions, Bulgarian historical and revolutionary films with anti-fascist themes and Polish war cinema. Despite the different contexts, Bulgarian and Polish film-makers were subjected by the authorities to political pressure and a foreordained point of view. Nevertheless, playing with censorship and taking advantage of the periods of ‘thaw’, the authors tried to ‘break’ the official historical narrative.