Mini biography

Krzysztof Kieslowski _{(27 June 1941 – 13 March 1996)}

Krzysztof Kie¶lowski (27 June 1941 – 13 March 1996) was a Polish film director and screenwriter.

He is known internationally for Dekalog (1989), The Double Life of Veronique (1991), and the Three Colours trilogy (1993 –1994).

Kie¶lowski received numerous awards during his career, including the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize (1988), FIPRESCI Prize (1988, 1991), and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (1991); the Venice Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize (1989), Golden Lion (1993), and OCIC Award (1993); and the Berlin International Film Festival Silver Bear (1994).

In 1995, he received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

In 2002, Kieslowski was listed at number two on the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound list of the top ten film directors of modern times.

“I know it’s unfashionable, but I believe in humanity.”

In 2007, Total Film magazine ranked him at No. 47 on its "100 Greatest Film Directors Ever" list.

Kieslowski remains one of Europe's most influential directors, his works included in the study of film classes at universities throughout the world. The 1993 book Kieslowski on Kieslowski describes his life and work in his own words, based on interviews by Danusia Stok. He is also the subject of a biographical film, Krzysztof Kieslowski: I'm So-So (1995), directed by Krzysztof Wierzbicki.

After Kieslowski's death, Harvey Weinstein, then head of Miramax Films, which distributed the last four Kieslowski films in the US, wrote a eulogy for him in Premiere magazine.

Though he had claimed to be retiring after Three Colours, at the time of his death, Kieslowski was working on a new trilogy co-written with Piesiewicz, consisting of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory and inspired by Dante's The Divine Comedy. As was originally intended for Dekalog, the scripts were ostensibly intended to be given to other directors for filming, but Kieslowski's untimely death means it is unknown whether he might have broken his self-imposed retirement to direct the trilogy himself. The only completed screenplay, Heaven, was filmed by Tom Tykwer and premiered in 2002 at the Berlin International Film Festival. The other two scripts existed only as thirty-page treatments at the time of Kieslowski's death; Piesiewicz has since completed these screenplays, with Hell, directed by Bosnian director Danis Tanoviæ and starring Emmanuelle Béart, released in 2005. Purgatory, about a photographer killed in the Bosnian war, remains unproduced. The 2007 film Nadzieja (Hope), directed by Ibo Kurdo and Stanislaw Mucha, also scripted by Piesiewicz, has been incorrectly identified as the third part of the trilogy, but is in fact, an unrelated project.

Jerzy Stuhr, who starred in several Kieslowski films and co-wrote Camera Buff, filmed his own adaptation of an unfilmed Kieslowski script as The Big Animal (Du¿e zwierzê) in 2000.

In an interview given at Oxford University in 1995, Kieslowski said:

    It comes from a deep-rooted conviction that if there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. ... Feelings are what link people together, because the word 'love' has the same meaning for everybody. Or 'fear', or 'suffering'. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. That's why I tell about these things, because in all other things I immediately find division.

In the foreword to Dekalog: The Ten Commandments, American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick wrote:

    I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work. But in this book of screenplays by Krzysztof Kieslowski and his co-author, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it should not be out of place to observe that they have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don't realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.

In 2012, Cyrus Frisch voted for A Short Film About Killing as one of "the best-damned films" with the comment: "In Poland, this film was instrumental in the abolition of the death penalty." Since 1952, Sight & Sound magazine conducts a poll every ten years of the world's finest film directors to determine the Ten Greatest Films of All Time, which has become the most recognised poll of its kind in the world.

Since 2011, the Polish Contemporary Art Foundation In Situ has been organizing The Soko³owsko Film Festival: Hommage à Kieslowski. It is an annual film festival in Soko³owsko, where Kieslowski spent a part of his youth, and commemorates the director's work with screenings of his films, as well as films of younger generations of filmmakers both from Poland and Europe, accompanied by creative workshops, panel discussions, performances, exhibitions and concerts.

On June 27, 2021, Google celebrated his 80th birthday with a Google Doodle.

Filmography

Feature films and TV drama

    Personnel (Personel TV drama 1975)
    The Scar (Blizna 1976)
    The Calm (Spokój 1976)
    The Card Index (Kartoteka 1979)
    Camera Buff (Amator 1979)
    Short Working Day (Krótki dzieñ pracy 1981)
    No End (Bez koñca 1985)
    Blind Chance (Przypadek made in 1981 but released in 1987)
    Dekalog (1988) (a series of 10 TV Films)
    A Short Film About Killing (Krotki film o zabijaniu 1988)
    A Short Film About Love (Krótki film o mi³o¶ci 1988)
    The Double Life of Veronique (La Double vie de Veronique/Podwójne ¿ycie Weroniki 1991)
    Three Colours: Blue (Trois couleurs: Bleu/Trzy kolory: Niebieski 1993)
    Three Colours: White (Trois couleurs: Blanc/Trzy kolory: Bia³y 1994)
    Three Colours: Red (Trois couleurs: Rouge/Trzy kolory: Czerwony 1994)

Director - Selected filmography

1. Three Colours: Red | Trois couleurs: Rouge | Trzy kolory: Czerwony (1994)
   
2. Three Colours: White (1994)
   
3. Three Colours: Blue | Trois couleurs: Bleu | Trzy kolory: Niebieski (1993)
   
4. The Double Life of Veronique | La Double vie de Veronique (1991)
   
5. A Short Film About Love | Krotki film o milosci (1988)
   
6. The Decalogue | Dekalog (1988) (a series of 10 TV Films)
   
7. A Short Film About Killing | Krotki film o zabijaniu (1988)