Wojciech Marczewski with the 49^th Polish Film Festival Platinum Lions Award

This year’s Polish Film Festival award for lifetime achievements goes to Wojciech Marczewski. The director will receive the Platinum Lions award during the Closing Gala of the 49^th Polish Film Festival.

I am very happy about the Platinum Lions award for Wojciech Marczewski. He is one of the greatest Polish filmmakers – very precise and at the same time a highly intuitive author. He has recently confessed to me that he still learns to name the rules governing film matter. His films, however, have always been mature in content and form. He is a director who has a secret, and I hope we will be able to reveal at least a part of it this year in Gdynia – says Joanna Łapińska, the Artistic Director of PFF.

Wojciech Marczewski is a film and television director, screenwriter, producer, renowned pedagogue, lecturer at film schools in London, Berlin, Copenhagen, Lodz, Warsaw and Katowice, and at the same time an unquestioned authority of Polish filmmaking community. He received the Gdansk Golden Lions award for the film Escape from the ‘Liberty’ Cinema (1990) and the Gdansk Silver Lions award for the films Shivers (1981) and Nightmares (1979), and also the Jury’s Special Award for the film Time of Treason (1997). Awarded in Berlin with the Silver Bear and the FIPRESCI Award for Shivers.

Wojciech Marczewski’s works, small in number as comprising only four cinema films, five television productions, a few student films and one TV series, strike with panache of the themes addressed, the director’s consistency and the scale of artistic challenges. Films by Wojciech Marczewski take a closer look at the condition of a 20th century man, in its most dramatic aspects, determined by history, ideology and the spirit of the times. The stories, nonetheless, are always intimate, delicate, moving with depth and clarity, impressive images created from metaphors, fantasies and memories.

Oh, that’s nice, they haven’t forgotten me yet. The feeling of satisfaction and surprise – comments Wojciech Marczewski. And he adds: An award for lifetime achievements? It’s time? Now, today? I thought it will happen someday. I am not ready, I haven’t finished or closed anything, all works are in progress, only partly recorded in my notes… Perhaps I should ask to be granted this award in few years time?

Leszek Kopeć, the Director of the Festival adds: I have cooperated with Wojciech Marczewski for over twenty years now in Gdynia Film School at the Pomeranian Film Workshops, and during three editions of the Polish Film Festival. It’s been a wonderful time. I wholeheartedly wish he gifts students with his pedagogic talent as long as possible.

The 49^th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia will take place on 23^rd–28^th September 2024.