He was one of the top directors in pre-war Poland, later an influential figure of the Italian film industry. He worked with Orson Welles, Sophia Loren or Vittorio De Sica, but the most spectacular movie he made was out of his own life. The restless life of an aristocrat, who changed continually his identity. And nobody knew why. This documentary is a cinematic journey on the trail of the mysterious Michał Waszyński. “The Prince and the Dybbuk” is a documentary film about Mosze Waks. Born in a poor family in a small Jewish shtetl in Ukraine, he dies in Madrid as the prince Michael Waszyński, Hollywood film producer and Polish aristocrat in exile. Along the way, in his colourful life, he assists Friedrich Murnau with the making of the film “Nosferatu,” infuriates the Third Reich’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, with his film “The Dybbuk,” and produces the most expensive motion picture in the history of cinema, “The Fall of the Roman Empire.” Those who had the opportunity to e across him, remembered him as an aristocrat, a lover of luxury, a liar, the wandering Jew and open homosexual and the husband of an Italian countess in one person.
