‘I have just returned from Warsaw. For two weeks, in that besieged city, I photographed the struggle and agony of people touched by the madness of war,’ says the film’s narrator and creator, American journalist Julien Bryan. He arrived in Warsaw on September 7, 1939, intending to document the eponymous siege. The harrowing footage was hidden in diplomatic luggage, and on September 21, 1939, he left the capital with members of the diplomatic corps. The film premiered in the United States in early 1940.

At the time of its release, Bryan’s documentary was the only testimony of the Polish defense during the 1939 campaign. Amid the mass-produced German propaganda films from the September campaign, shown almost worldwide, Siege was a quiet voice of dissent from a fallen country that, after twenty years of freedom, was about to fall into captivity again.