Polish filmmaker Dorota Kedzierzawska held a press conference on Wednesday December 8th in Warehouse C. The TIFF director, Dimitris Eipides attended the conference. Arthur Reinhart, director of photography, producer, collaborator and husband of the film director was also present. The Thessaloniki Film Festival is holding a tribute to Dorota Kedzierzawska and will award her the honorary Golden Alexander.
“I am proud that the festival is able to present this year an almost complete retrospective of the work of Dorota Kedzierzawska, Poland’s top film director”, Mr Eipides declared at the beginning of the press conference. He confessed to be under the charm of her films which, he added, are in the vein of traditional Polish cinema, reflecting elements from Kieslowski’s films and promoting human feelings above all. “More than anything, Dorota Kedzierzawska’s films are warmly human, they give an optimistic view of the world.”
“I am embarrassed, I am not used to compliments”, were the Polish film director’s first words. At a later stage during the conference she declared that the people around her did not believe she would make it in the world of cinema because of her excessive shyness. On the other hand, she found herself in this cinema world from a very early age since her mother, Jadwiga Kedzierzawska, was herself a film director, producing mainly children’s films. “When my mother was shooting a film and took me with her, all she wanted of me was that I keep quiet. I did, and watched what was going around me for hours: this was a magic world for me.”
The heroes in her films are mainly children and the elderly. “I have a soft spot for people who are fragile, and this explains my choices in my films so far. But making films with children does not mean they are meant only for children, I get through to adults as well. Usually the idea for a film comes from something I have seen or heard and the image it conferred appealed to me. I am interested in people who live other situations to the ‘normal’ ones, and the way in which they struggle to conquer these situations. In daily struggles feelings of love and friendship give us courage and make us feel more optimistic”, she said.
When she was asked how easy or how difficult it was for her to work with children, she said that indeed this was quite different to working with adults. As Arthur Reinhart pointed out –he has worked together with the film director in most of her films-, from a technical point of view the entire process is a difficult one because children find it difficult to concentrate and have a tendency to improvise. “It requires enormous patience to create the appropriate climate of absolute confidence among us all, children and adults. Once or twice we auditioned children but it didn’t work out. So we pick out children from among our acquaintances when we realize that they have it in them to stand in front of the camera”, Dorota Kedzierzawska concluded.
The subject matter in her films often mirrors a harsh reality but it is softened by the beauty of the images. As Arthur Reinhart explained, this is sometimes due to a deliberate choice. A typical example of this is the film Nothing where the main character is a mother who has decided to kill her new-born child. “In this specific film one would expect the image to be as terrible and awful as the subject matter. But we decided to show the mother more as a Madonna than a sinner, and she is shown with a halo around her head.”
It seemed inevitable that the film director being a woman, and at that one of Poland’s most prominent filmmakers who, according to many people, brings out films that are essentially feminine, she would be asked what her position was regarding feminism. “It is obvious that my view of life has been defined by the fact that I was born a girl, the influence my parents had on me, the city where I was born; now, if this is a particular feminine view, I don’t know. And I certainly never felt any gender discrimination in my field of work.”
Talking about her film Time to Die the film director pointed out that the script had been written specifically for the veteran actress, Danuta Szaflarska, who is the film’s protagonist. Dorota Kedzierzawska first met the actress years before while shooting Devils, Devils. “At the time I promised I would write a script just for her; sixteen years elapsed but Danuta Szaflarska was patient, though she did phone me now and again to tell me to hurry because the years were going by and she might not make it. The idea for the film –an old woman who wants to save her house- comes from a real story: a neighbour in Lodz spent years trying to get rid of the people who, under communism, were given her house to live in.”
Dorota Kedzierzawska will be awarded the 51st TIFF honorary Golden Alexander at a ceremony to be held December 9 at 20.15 in the Olympion Cinema. Her film Time to Die will be screened immediately after the ceremony. The film director declared she was impatient and curious to hear the comments of the Greek audience, adding: “We always try to do what we have in our minds and in our hearts, without compromises in an effort to make our films commercial.”
