Born in the city of Lódz in Poland, director Jerzy Skolimowski has embodied versatile talents - as a filmmaker, scriptwriter, poet, playwright, painter and actor - in a filmography which is full of visual and narrative inventiveness.
Jerzy Skolimowski graduated in Ethnography from the Warsaw University and in Direction from the Lódz Film School, in 1962. At the same time as he began his work as a film director, he also participated in several films as an actor.
As one of the most particular voices of the New Wave of Polish cinema in the 1960s, Skolimowski has pursued a very particular artistic path, divided between Poland (his four initial and iconic works, after collaborating with Wajda and Polanski, and his three most recent films - Four Nights with Anna, Essential Killing and 11 Minutes - following a 17-year voluntary hiatus in filmmaking) and an artistic roaming through several countries and productions. His artistic gesture is crossed by a visionary, unusual capacity of capturing human beings facing their own time and circumstances.
With a body of work of more than 20 films, Jerzy Skolimowski has received several awards at the most important European film festivals, such as the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for the film The Departure (1967) and the Grand Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival for The Shout (1978). With Moonlighting (1982), starring Jeremy Irons, he won the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 2008, the year he returned to filmmaking, Skolimowski presented Four Nights with Anna at the Director’s Fortnight of the Cannes Film Festival. In 2011, his film Essential Killing, starring Vincent Gallo, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Jerzy Skolimowski was at the LEFFEST competition last year with his film 11 Minutes, which won the Jaeger-LeCoultre Award for Best Film.
This year he returns for a special tribute and a retrospective of his work.