Jerzy Kawalerowicz

On his father’s side, the filmmaker has Armenian roots, in fact his last name derives from Kavalarian. Trained in painting and art history at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, he also studied at the Krakow Film Institute. After working as an assistant to directors such as Stanislaw Urbanowicz and Leonard Buczkowski, in 1950 he co-wrote the screenplay for The Commune with Kazimierz Sumerski , which after receiving an award, they both co-directed, becoming his film debut. The story presents neorealist features, a film movement that is of interest in Eastern countries, although the authorities regard it with ambivalence, because although they value its social concern, they do not like that attention is paid to the problems of the individual instead of focusing the shot in the community.Celluloza and Under the Phrygian Star , is the adaptation in 1954, in two installments, of a well-known novel by Igor Newerly, set in Poland between the wars. 1955 will be the year in which he takes over the production company Kadr Films.

In La sombra (1956) he delivers a unique detective story that paves the way for his first indisputable success, Baltic Express / Night Train (1959), an original “intrigue without intrigue”, a bit like Antonioni, which runs brilliantly in the inside a train He stars in the film Lucyna Winnicka , the director’s wife, with whom he would have two children, and who appeared in many of his films as an undeniable muse.

The ground is fertile to achieve recognition in Cannes in 1961 with Madre Juana de los Ángeles , Special Jury Prize, with Winnicka assuming the title character. The film describes with calculated ambiguity a case of diabolical possession of a community of nuns, which allows psychological introspection of the characters, the priest in charge of carrying out the exorcism, and the nuns possessed by demons or dominated by hysterical arrogance, both riding, riding so much.

Kawalerowicz is set to direct his most ambitious film, at least as far as production is concerned. Pharaoh (1966), based on the novel by Boleslaw Prus, describes in detail ancient Egypt, its class system and the priestly caste, in what seems clear a Marxist reading of the matter that would undoubtedly please the communist authorities, although at the same time the different worldviews of the Church and the world were underlined. State in Poland. The absence of any Hollywood concession is surprising, the film seems like a true journey through time, and that precisely in the United States they recognize with an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. The director would return to the cinema about antiquity in Quo Vadis (2001) , adaptation of the unforgettable work of his compatriot and Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a kind of response to the well-known Hollywood version. The film is more realistic in its images when it comes to dealing with the sufferings of the first Christians in Nero’s Rome, and the filmmaker had the satisfaction of being able to have the premiere in the Vatican with an exceptional spectator, his countryman Pope John Paul II. If in Mother Juana de los Ángeles she claimed to have made a film against religious fanaticism, in Quo Vadis (2001) her intention was to show how Christianity humanized a barbaric world, including the “civilized” Roman Empire.

After shooting Juego (1969) and Maddalena (1971), he deals with an event in recent Polish history in The Death of the President(1977), the assassination of the liberal Polish president Henryk Sienkiewicz, in 1922. The film, markedly documentary in style, would receive an award at the Berlin Festival. In Austeria (1983) she would direct her gaze to his hometown, where Ukrainians, Poles and Jews lived together in peace, on the eve of the First World War; according to Kawalerowicz, his intention was to inquire into the Jewish soul, to somehow point out how the holocaust was possible in terms of a certain passivity of the Jews in the face of persecution.

Kawalerowicz’s cinema is characterized by the study of characters and the internal forces that advance the history of humanity. With elegant staging and original planning and a sense of framing, his filmography closed with the aforementioned adaptation of “Quo Vadis” in 2001. The director would die six years later, on December 27, 2007.