Agnieszka Piotrowska

Agnieszka Piotrowska

Agnieszka Piotrowska(?1968) is an acclaimed and often controversial documentary film-maker, academic and theatre practitioner probably best known for her 2008 documentary Married to the Eiffel Tower,[1] about women who fall in love with objects." The film was screened all over the world by broadcasters, festivals and educational institutions, being called a piece on tolerance and generosity of spirit.[2] [3]

Background

Piotrowska went to school in Sopot, Poland and Sweden. She studied at Hull University, graduated from Reading University with a MA in Modern European Drama with special supervision at Christ Church, Oxford, and from Birkbeck, University of London in 2012 with a PhD.[4]

In October 2009 Piotrowska was among the most successful Polish artists living in London, featured in the exhibition London Creatives/Polish Roots at the Barbican's Museum of London, alongside Paul Pawlikowski and Zygmunt Bauman.[5]

Professional activity

In 1989 she filmed Out of the Ruins, about the 1988 Armenian earthquake. Aid Armenia International re-released it on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster in 2008.[6] Composer Michael Nyman conducted a choral work for the film which was subsequently released a Silva Screen CD.[7]

Her 1995 Sex, Lies and Jerzy Kosinski, about the Polish-American writer who committed suicide in New York, was nominated for the Arts Documentary Emmy in 1995.[8] Her 1998 Showgirl Stories was less favorably received.[9][10]

She directed two episodes of Channel 4's Cutting Edge, Love Hurts (1999),[11] about domestic violence, and Trapped By My Twin (2007),[12] about twin sisters who are constantly together. Trapped By My Twin was the highest-rated documentary in the last run of the strand and was nominated by Channel 4 for a Mental Health Award and Broadcast Award.

Rivercourt Productions

From 1999 to 2005 she made a number of films through her own production company Rivercourt Productions. Rivercourt produced the series Self Portrait for National Geographic as well as the partially animated series Running for Freedom, including the episode about Muslim/Jewish Roxanna.

Rivercourt's 2002 documentary Poker Club,[13] shown on Channel 4 in their Cutting Edge series, was heavily criticised by Victoria Coren in her Poker memoir For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker.[14]

Other and recent work

In late 2005, Piotrowska's feature-length documentary The Bigamists[15] won the Fred Wiseman Masterclass Award at the Dublin Film Festival.

In 2006, her acclaimed documentary Conman With 14 Wives, about international fraudster Oliver Killeen, brought his further activities to light assisting with his former stepdaughter, Julia Lafleur's fight to bring him to justice in Canada.[16] Oliver Killeen attempted to stop the broadcast of the documentary but he later changed his mind and even gave permission to Piotrowska to use their correspondence in her academic writing.[17]

In 2009 Piotrowska filmed a one-hour documentary about the "Best Job in the World" phenomenon, which was the highest-rated show of the week it was broadcast on BBC1.[18] In July 2010 the film was a highlight of Birkbeck College's Business Week.

In October 2010 her work was featured at the International Extravagant Bodies Festival in Zagreb, Croatia.

Zimbabwe

In November 2012 her film The Engagement Party in Harare premiered at the International Images Festival for Women in Zimbabwe and was nominated for Best Documentary Film. Piotrowska was the only European filmmaker to be granted a distinction in the documentary competition.[19]

In April 2014 she directed "Lovers in Time", a play by Zimbabwean writer Blessing Hungwe, at the Harare International Festival of the Arts.[20] The play was controversial for its portrayal of two spirit mediums who are Zimbabwean national heroes.[21][22]

In October 2014 she presented her short film Flora and Dambudzo, which featured Zimbabwe writer Dambudzo Marechera, at the Zimbabwe International Film Festival to considerable acclaim. This was the first time the iconic Zimbabwean writer's life was presented in film.[23]

Academic Activity

She has been a Reader in Film Practice and Theory at University of Bedfordshire since 2012.[24]

Her PhD thesis was the basis of her 2014 book Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary.[25] In 2015 she also edited "Embodied Encounters:New Approaches to Psychoanalysis and Cinema".[26]

References

  1. ↑ http://www.kontejner.org/married-to-the-eiffel-tower-english
  2. ↑ http://www.freud.org.uk/events/74386/married-to-the-eiffel-tower-/
  3. ↑ http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/bigs/pastactivities/pastactivities2010
  4. ↑ http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychosocial/our-staff/full-time-academic-staff/stephen-frosh
  5. ↑ http://www.theculturalpick.com/webzine/londoncreativespolishroots/
  6. ↑ http://www.aidarmenia.com/info.php
  7. ↑ Out of the Ruins
  8. ↑ http://variety.com/1995/scene/markets-festivals/international-emmy-nominations-unveiled-99129269/
  9. ↑ Kelleher, Terry (June 14, 1999). "Picks and Pans Review: Showgirl Stories". People Magazine 51 (22). Retrieved 2015-02-06. Bottom Line: So-so study of girls, girls, girls
  10. ↑ Bianculli, David (June 11, 1999). "'Showgirls' Documentary Isn't All That Revealing". New York Daily News. Retrieved 2015-02-06. Like the onstage demeanor of the women it profiles, Sunday night's two-hour Learning Channel documentary, "Showgirl Stories", is a bit of a tease, and what it presents is more superficial than substantial. ... [An] often meandering and incomplete study.
  11. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1044216/
  12. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1035981
  13. ↑ BFI entry for Poker Club retrieved May 2011
  14. ↑ Coren, Victoria (2010). For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker. McClelland & Stewart. p. 132. ISBN 9780771022944. There is less chat and laughter, more focused concentration. But the quiet is broken when Agnieszka Piotrowska (the director, camera-woman and 'brains' behind the TV documentary) thrusts a microphone towards Catman, who is dealing the cards, and asks whether he bribed the players to attend his tournament. We all look up, shocked. Bribery? Catman is the most shocked of all. He may be a poker player, but a single snide question has transformed him into a mass of tells. Not the tells of a duper, but of one who has been duped. Suddenly, Catman is seeing the whole picture. He isn't the hero of a glamorous TV show. He is the gull of media people hoping to rake scandal and skulduggery from the poker gutter. They want to hear about bribery, not charity. They want to make us all look like crooks. That is the story they came to tell.
  15. ↑ Rosenthal, Alan (2007). Writing, directing and producing documentary films and Videos (4 ed.). Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-2742-3.
  16. ↑ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/.../How-jokey-tale-of-the-man-with-14-wives-became-a-horror-story.html
  17. ↑ http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1386/sdf.6.1.15_1
  18. ↑ http://www.bbk.ac.uk/news/news-releases/how-would-you-apply-for-the-best-job-in-the-world
  19. ↑ http://www.ambafrance-zw.org/The-International-Images-Film
  20. ↑ http://www.hararenews.co.zw/2014/04/nehanda-as-a-white-man-lovers-in-time-historical-comedy-set-for-hifa/
  21. ↑ http://www.herald.co.zw/producer-seeks-ban-on-hifa-play/
  22. ↑ http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/uk-scholar-and-zimbabwean-playwright-join-forces-in-risky-drama/2012942.article
  23. ↑ http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/uk-based-academics-film-well-received-in-zimbabwe/2016844.article
  24. ↑ "Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska". University of Bedfordshire. Retrieved 2015-02-06.
  25. ↑ http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415813495/
  26. ↑ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Embodied-Encounters-approaches-psychoanalysis-cinema/dp/1138795259

External links

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