- Educated at Warsaw University.
- Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 357-360. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.
- After World War II he headed the government-controlled Film Polski organization.
- Father of Aleksander Ford.
- His documentary Children Must Laugh (1938), concerning impoverished Jewish and Polish orphans in a sanatorium, was banned for being "a vehicle for Communist propaganda".
- Along with fellow Pole Jerzy Bossak, he created an avant-garde cinema company, in 1943, with the aim of filming reports on the Polish struggle and the work of the partisans in the fight against the Nazi invaders.
- After the war, Ford was appointed head of the government-controlled Film Polski and held enormous sway over the country's entire film industry. In the process of accumulating power, he denounced a fellow film director Jerzy Gabryelski to the Soviet NKVD secret police, contentiously accusing him of "reactionary" and "antisemitic" views, which resulted in Gabryelski's arrest and torture.
- When World War II began, 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. The unit was called Czolówka Filmowa Ludowego Wojska Polskiego (or simply Czolówka; spearhead).
- In 1932 he directed one of the first movies made about the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine, "Sabra".
- Ford made his first feature film, Mascot in 1930, after a year of making short silent films. He did not use sound until The Legion of the Streets (1932).
- Over time, he became aggressive towards his wife, so she eventually left for the United States, where her parents lived. In 1979, the bank took away his villa in Copenhagen, as a result of which he had to move to a municipal tenement house [102] . At the beginning of 1980, he flew to the USA to meet his wife, but she filed for divorce, which ended with the final separation of both spouses on February 14, 1980.
- Until 1968, he was the ruler of Polish cinematography, but also its dynamic organizer. It was he, as a colonel of the Polish Army, who ordered the requisition of film equipment from Babelsberg in Berlin, which enabled the immediate start of film production. He organized film teams in which Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Munk , Wojciech Has, Kazimierz Kutz developed their talents.
- 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.
- He moved in 1970 to Denmark and eventually settled in the United States. Ford made two more feature films, both of which were commercial and critical failures.
- In the years 1948-1968 he was a lecturer at the State Film, Television and Theater School in Lódz.
- On 10 May 2004, a Ford star was unveiled on Piotrkowska Street in Lódz on the Walk of Fame (near the Grand Hotel and the "Polonia" cinema).
- Ford served twenty years as a professor at the state-run National Film School in Lódz (Panstwowa Wyzsza Szkola Filmowa).
- While in exile, he tried to commit suicide twice, the second attempt being successful. He tried to commit suicide for the first time in Copenhagen on July 30, 1975, a year after the failure of the film You are free, Mr. Korczak. He was in a coma for several weeks, from which doctors managed to wake him up.
- In 1970, he went to Israel, where he counted on co-financing the production of The First Circle by an American producer, who, however, turned out to be a fraud. Ford also rejected an offer to lecture at Tel Aviv University.
- He also directed the first Polish blockbuster - the film " Teutonic Knights", which enjoyed record attendance with 33 million viewers and was nominated for an American Oscar.
- He is perhaps best remembered for directing the first postwar documentary Majdanek - cmentarzysko Europy (Majdanek - the Cemetery of Europe) and the feature film Knights of the Teutonic Order (1960), based on a novel of the same name by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz.
- At the beginning of 1980, he flew to the USA to meet his wife, but she filed for divorce, which ended with the final separation of both spouses on February 14, 1980. On April 4, 1980, after recording two farewell tapes addressed to his wife and daughter, he committed suicide - he hanged himself in the Suntide Motel in Naples, Florida.
- People called him: an artist, a tsar, a colonel... In a sense, everything was true. Rough and domineering, but liked by film crew members as an outstanding professional and a reliable person.
- He belonged to the Polish United Workers' Party , from whose ranks he was removed in 1968 for "an attitude contrary to the party's position".
- Ford and a group of colleagues from the Polish Communist Party rebuilt most of the country's film production infrastructure. Roman Polanski wrote in his biography about them: "They included some extremely competent people, notably Aleksander Ford, a veteran party member, who was then an orthodox Stalinist. The real power broker during the immediate postwar period was Ford himself, who established a small film empire of his own.".
- In 1968, as part of anti-Semitic purges in the country, he was removed from all positions and soon emigrated from Poland. He couldn't find a place in Israel, Denmark and Germany, and finally settled in the USA with his second wife, American actress Eleanor Griswold, who was previously in a relationship with Zygmunt Kaluzynski.
- Blacklisted by the Polish communist government as a political defector, Ford became a non-person in contemporary discussions and analysis of Polish filmmaking.
- 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.
- Accused of antisocialist activity and expelled from the Communist Party, Ford emigrated in 1968 to Israel where he lived for the next two years.
- Other directors and critics sometimes saw him as a dictator and satrap. Not very impressive externally, it exuded a strange charm that attracted women. Privately, he was associated with Aleksandra Slaska , Sonja Ziemann and other famous ladies.
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