Amid an anti-Semitic purge in the communist party in Poland, Ford was stopped from preparing a film on the life of a Jewish educator.

[4] 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.

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.

For the next twenty years, Ford served as a professor at the state-run National Film School in Łódź (Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa).

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.