In his 1989 memoir Double Vision, the great Polish film director Andrzej Wajda wrote that "films made in Eastern Europe seem of little or no interest to people in the West.

The audience in Western countries find them as antediluvian as the battle for workers' rights in England at the time of Marx."

He may have been right then, but he's wrong now. This spring a wave of Polish cinema both old and new crashes over the UK in the form of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, and the chances are audiences are going to be very interested indeed.

Particularly pleasing for the 89-year-old Wajda is a retrospective strand curated by American filmmaker Martin Scorsese and containing several of the Pole's classic films. Among these are 1958's Ashes And Diamonds, the searing final part of Wajda's war trilogy; his epic, state-of-the-nation film The Promised Land, from 1975; and Man Of Iron, shot against the backdrop of the Solidarity protests of 1980 and a sequel of sorts to 1976's Man Of Marble. Union leader and future Polish president Lech Walesa even has a cameo in it, appearing as himself. Banned in Poland, Man Of Iron won the Palme d'Or at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival.

Scorsese's 24-film Masterpieces Of Polish Cinema season runs until June at Edinburgh's Filmhouse cinema and also includes early works by Roman Polanski, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Agnieszka Holland (the only woman on the list), as well as cult classics such as hallucinatory Wojciech Has pair The Hourglass Sanatorium and The Saragossa Manuscript, much loved by The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia. The films cover a 30-year period from 1958 and many of the filmmakers are members of the so-called Polish School, a generation of directors trained at the famous film academy in Lodz. It was on a visit there to receive an honourary doctorate in 2011 that Scorsese first had the idea of mounting a retrospective of these digitally-restored classics.

He knew all about Polish cinema and Lodz's contribution to it from his days studying film at New York University in the 1960s. Indeed, aspects of the character Harvey Keitel plays in Mean Streets are an homage to Zbigniew Cybulski's performance as an anti-Communist partisan in Ashes And Diamonds, to Scorsese's mind one of the greatest films ever made.

But if the rest of us need reasons to care about Polish cinema, we should look no further than 20th-century history itself. After all, it was Poland's invasion by Germany which started the Second World War in 1939, and it was the liberation of Auschwitz six years later which forever linked the country, previously home to a massive Jewish community, with the horrors of the Holocaust. Finally it was a Pole, Wadowice-born Karol Wojty�a, whose election as Pope John Paul II began the process which eventually led to the fall of Communism. The Polish story, then, is central to that of 20th-century Europe, and for the last 60 years its filmmakers have grappled with that fact.

Accordingly, certain themes appear regularly in Polish cinema: memory, history, Jewishness, absence, conflict, national identity, jazz (yes, really) and, of course, politics. But given the artistic restrictions many directors laboured under during the Communist era, these themes are often presented wrapped in allegory and metaphor, or served up in coded and veiled forms. That adds another very particular flavour.

In 1980's Austeria, for instance, director Jerzy Kawalerowicz tackles the Holocaust obliquely by making a film about anti-Semitism during the First World War. Wojciech Has, in his 1973 film The Hourglass Sanatorium, stitches short stories by Bruno Schulz into a piece of free-wheeling cinematic theatre in which a man looking for his Jewish shopkeeper father stumbles off a train and into a ruined hospital where time has been tinkered with so all the patients are forever asleep. Vividly painted - the only word for Has's stunning image-making - it serves up tableaux after tableaux of slow-moving weirdness. Imagine Mr Benn re-imagined by Peter Greenaway. A sobering coda: Schulz, one of Poland's most revered pre-war writers, was murdered by a Nazi officer in November 1942 while walking home to the Drohobycz ghetto. Many of his works were lost in the Holocaust, including his final novel.

Man Of Iron, Ashes And Diamonds and Janusz Morgenstern's 1972 film To Kill This Love deal with politics and social concerns in a more or less realistic way, as does Krzysztof Kieslowski's controversial 1988 work A Short Film About Killing. But in Jump (1965) and Knights Of The Black Cross (1960), Tadeusz Konwicki and Aleksander Ford take a more tangential approach. There are flavours of Luis Bunuel and Franz Kafka in the first, which presents a man (the ubiquitous Zbigniew Cybulski, wearing sunglasses as usual) who turns up in a small town looking for sanctuary and claiming to have hidden there during the war. But the townsfolk all remember him differently, if they remember him at all. "I used to live here," he tells the first householder he encounters. "It's better not to recall," the man replies.

Ford's epic historical film, meanwhile, tells the story of the Battle of Grunwald, fought in 1410 and a victory for the Poles against the Germans which occupies the same role in their national story as Bannockburn does for Scots. Within four years of its release it had been seen by 14 million people, proof of its resonance with a people who felt no more kindly towards the Russians than they did towards the Germans.

And jazz? For Polish directors in the late 1950s/early 1960s, it was the ultimate anti-establishment music and therefore an obvious soundtrack to their films. So enthusiastically did they embrace it that its use in Polish cinema is the subject of a recently released four-CD boxset, Out Of The Underground 1958-1967. Among the featured scores are those for Roman Polanski's 1962 debut feature Knife In The Water, Andrzej Wajda's Innocent Sorcerers (1960) and Jerzy Skolimowski's Walkover (1965). All three films feature in the Masterpieces Of Polish Cinema season.

In a written introduction, Martin Scorsese talks about "the great, sweeping, humanistic, intimate and profound movies" of his youth which seem "more and more like a golden age of international cinema". Three of the cornerstones of that "golden age", he says, are the films of the Italian Neo-Realists, the French New Wave and what he calls "the old Hollywood masters". The fourth, he adds, is Polish cinema.

Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces Of Polish Cinema is at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh until June 17, www.filmhousecinema.com