KINOTEKA: Paweł Pawlikowski Documentaries + Q&A

To celebrate the recent successes of Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida, the winner of this year's Oscars Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language category, BAFTA Award for Best Film Not In the English Language and the Oscars nominee for Cinematography, KINOTEKA presents programme of the documentary films which commenced Pawlikowski’s career in filmmaking.

These highly poetic and imagistic pieces won him fans and many awards around the world, including Grierson Award and Emmy International. Pawlikowski’s distinctive mixing of facts with elements of the personal and poetic has challenged the boundaries of the television documentary and influenced his later cinematic work.

KINOTEKA invites you to a weekend with Paweł Pawlikowski and his documentaries: a journey into the tragi-comic and absurd lives of characters like Vladimir Zhirinovsky or the only living descendant of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Serbian Epics

Highly original and formally constructed film Serbian Epics (1992) was made at the height of the Bosnian war, using the siege of Sarayevo as its central image. It includes close up footage of Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, both later wanted by the international court of justice for war crimes.

This multi-layered, ironic, imagistic and at times almost hypnotic study of myth-making and murder aroused a storm of controversy, including questions in the house of commons, at the time of its broadcast.

Tripping With Zhirinovsky

Tripping with Zhirinovsky is a surreal boat journey down the Volga with the Russian nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his retinue, as he campaigns to win the Russian presidency in 1994.

He travels from Moscow to the Caspian Sea, trying to raise the spirits of the impoverished masses assembled at the quayside, promising the re-conquest of Alaska, access to the Indian Ocean and free nylon stockings. The film won the Grierson award for the Best British Documentary in 1995.

Paweł Pawlikowski, born in 1957, is an Oscar-winning Polish/British film director who has lived and worked most of his life in the UK. His films Last Resort (2000) and My Summer of Love (2004) both won the BAFTA award. His low budget black-and-white drama Ida (2013) won 2015 Oscars Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and 2015 BAFTA Award for Best Film Not In the English Language, and was nominated to 2015 Oscars for Cinematography.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Paweł Pawlikowski

The screening is part of the 13th KINOTEKA Polish Film festival. See the full programme.