Paweł Pawlikowski

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Paweł Pawlikowski

Born

Pawel Pawlikowski
1957
Warsaw, Poland

Awards won
BAFTA Awards
Most Promising Newcomer 2000 Last Resort Best British Film 2004 My Summer of Love

Paweł Pawlikowski (born 1957) is a Polish-born, Oxford-based, BAFTA Award-winning filmmaker and acadmeic. He garnered much acclaim for his BAFTA Award-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 BAFTA and a string of other awards at festivals around the world.

[edit] Career

In the late 1980s and '90s 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 Venedikt Erofeev, for which he won Emmy and RTS Awards 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, made at the height of the Bosnian war, included close up footage of Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, both now wanted by the international court of justice, and the famous siege of Sarajevo. 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 (Zhirinovsky) 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.

Between 2004 and 2007 he was a Creative Arts Fellow at Oxford Brookes University.

In 2006 his adaptation of Magnus Mills' The Restraint of Beasts went into production but was postponed by the death of his wife. Future projects include an adaptation of Vernon God Little, an original story entitled Dreamcatcher, and a Georgian-language adaptation of Young Stalin.