Paweł Pawlikowski

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Paweł Pawlikowski is a Polish-born filmmaker who garnered much acclaim for his Bafta winning Last Resort which he wrote and directed in 2000 and My Summer of Love, loosely based on Helen Cross' novel, which also won a [[British Academy of Film and Television Arts|BAFTA] and a string of other awards at festivals around the world.

He is currently directing a film adaptation of The Restraint of Beasts which he has also adapted himself.

In the late 80's and 90's Pawlikowski was best known for his documentaries, whose unique blend of lyricism and irony, won him many fans and awards around the world. "Moscow Pietushki" was a poetic journey into the world of the Russian cult writer Vyenedikt Yerofeyev, for which he won an Emmy, Royal Television Society Award and others. The multi-award winning "Dostoevsky's Travels" was a comic road movie with a St Petersburg tram driver and the only living descendant of Fyodor Dostoevsky, as he travels rough around Western Europe haunting high-minded humanists, aristocrats, monarchists and the Baden Baden casino - in his quest to raise money to buy a second hand Mercedes. Pawlikowski's most original and formally successful film was "Serbian Epics" (1992) which was made at the height of the Bosnian war. The oblique, ironic, imagistic, at times almost hypnotic study of myth-making and murder made aroused a storm of controversy and incomprehension at the time, but has now secured it something of a cult status. The absurdist "Tripping with Zhirinovsky", a surreal boat journey down the Volga with the Russian would-be dictator has won Pawlikowski the Grierson award for the Best British Documentary in 1995.

Pawlikowski's transition to fiction occurred in 1998 with a small 50 minute hybrid film Twockers, a lyrical and gritty love story set on a sink estate in Yorkshire, which he co-wrote and co-directed with Ian Duncan.