A Retrospective of Pawel Pawlikowski’s films

Since making his first film nearly 30 years ago, Academy Award–winning director Pawel Pawlikowski has established himself as one of the most accomplished and adventurous filmmakers working today.

Born in Warsaw, Poland, he emigrated to England as a teenager, and made his first films there—documentaries with peripatetic themes and titles (From Moscow to Pietushki: A Journey with Benedict Yerofeyev, Dostoevsky’s Travels) that hinted at greater movements to come. An evolution into hybrid films saw him transition away from documentaries and toward vivid dramas that were nevertheless rooted in real experience. From early 21st century gems Last Resort and My Summer of Love through his return to Poland for the internationally celebrated Ida (Winner Best Foreign Language Film at the 2014 Academy Awards) and his newest film, Cold War (Winner of Best Director Award at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival), Pawlikowski has centered his work around complex female characters, and introduced the world to actresses such as Emily Blunt, Natalie Press, Dina Korzun, and Joanna Kulig. Though singular and individually inhabited, each of these stories suggests both universal experience as well the ongoing personal preoccupations of a filmmaker reckoning with the dislocations, traumas, discoveries, and ecstasies of lives both authored and inherited.

This series represents the most extensive retrospective of Pawlikowski’s work to date and is presented in anticipation of the theatrical release of Cold War, which opens on December 21 at Film Forum and The Film Society of Lincoln Center. Presented with support from Amazon Studios.

SCHEDULE:

My Summer of Love
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7, 7:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 16, 4:30 P.M.
Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski. 2004, 86 mins. 35mm. With Natalie Press, Emily Blunt, Paddy Considine. Emily Blunt, in her film debut, plays Tamsin, an upper middle class woman who, recently suspended from boarding school, begins a tentative relationship with Mona (Press), a tough working class girl whose only family is her brother Phil, fresh out of prison and newly a born-again Christian. Shrewdly observing the English class system as perhaps an emigre is best equipped to do, Pawlikowski offers a passionate and sometimes painful portrayal of two girls in love, negotiating a minefield of personal problems and social pressures.

Dostoevsky’s Travels and Tripping with Zhirinovsky
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2:00 P.M.
Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski. Approx. 97 mins. Digital projection.
Dostoevsky’s Travels (1991, 52 mins). A literature-inspired travelogue like From Moscow to Pietushki, Dostoevsky’s Travels is a unique hybrid documentary road movie in which Pawlikowski follows Dimitri Dostoevsky, a tram driver in Leningrad and the great-grandson of the author of Crime and Punishment, his only surviving descendant. Together they travel to post-reunification Germany, looking back at the artistic legacy of Dimitri’s celebrated ancestor, while simultaneously anticipating the future in a newly capitalist Eastern Europe.
Followed by: Tripping with Zhirinovsky (1995, 45 mins). A surreal boat trip down the Volga with the Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who had emerged as a media celebrity following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, wielding a brand of anti-Western ultranationalist populism of a sort that has become eerily familiar in the years since Pawlikowski’s film was made. Free with Museum admission.

From Moscow to Pietushki: A Journey with Benedict Yerofeyev
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 8, 4:30 P.M.
Approximate run time: 95 mins.
From Moscow to Pietushki: A Journey with Benedict Yerofeyev. Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski. 1990 45 mins. Digital projection. An epic pseudo-autobiographical prose poem, Moscow-Pietushki is one of the masterpieces of the samizdat literature of the Soviet era, grassroots dissident writing circulated through underground channels. Released after the Revolutions of 1989, Pawlikowski’s documentary films the dying author and follows in the footsteps of his protagonist, finding traces of the author in the memory of passengers, as well as a raucous, inebriate Russia. Followed by another early short film, to be announced. Free with Museum admission.

Ida
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 8, 7:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 16, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski. 2013. 82 mins. 35mm. With Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Dawid Ogrodnik. Preparing to take her vows as a Catholic nun, Ida, a young woman orphaned during World War II, first goes forth into the venal world to tie up loose ends. Soon she encounters her hard-drinking, promiscuous aunt, an infamous state prosecutor in the Polish People’s Republic, who informs her that her parents were Jewish, sending Ida on an investigative journey to quite literally unearth her past. A haunted film of brittle, elegant beauty, Ida won deserved plaudits, including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and its austere approach recently inspired Paul Schrader’s First Reformed.

DOUBLE FEATURE

Twockers
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 9, 3:30 P.M.
Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski. 1998, 40 mins. With Trevor Wademan, Amie Oie, Craig Wademan. A gritty and lyrical docu-drama made for British television, Twockers revolves around the dead-end lives and hope-inspiring loves of teenage car thieves. Told in beautifully composed static shots, against the backdrop of bleak Yorkshire landscapes, with the nonprofessional cast essentially playing versions of themselves, Twockers offers an empathetic, insider’s view of rough-and-ready life on the dole.

Last Resort with Pawel Pawlikowski in person
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 9, 4:30 P.M.
Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski. 2000. 73 mins. Imported 35mm print. With Dina Korzun, Artyom Strelnikov, Paddy Considine. Arriving with her young son in London, a young Russian woman (Korzun) expects to be greeted by her fiancé, but when he doesn’t appear, finds herself instead plunged into a bureaucratic purgatory, waiting in the quiet seaside town of “Stonehaven”—actually Margate—to hear if their application for asylum has been accepted. Along the way she begins a tentative relationship with a local amusement arcade’s manager, played by Paddy Considine. The film is as much a study of love between mother and son, as a portrait of the plight of the stateless asylum-seeker, achieved with enormous emotional acuity. Free with Museum admission.

PREVIEW SCREENING & LIVE EVENT

Cold War with Pawel Pawlikowski in person
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 9, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski. 2018, 98 mins. DCP courtesy of Amazon Studios. With Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Szyc, and Agata Kulesza. The latest film from Academy Award–winning director Pawlikowski is a wrenching, star-crossed love story between a man and a woman who meet in the ruins of post-war Poland, fatefully mismatched in their vastly different backgrounds and temperaments, and yet condemned to each other. Their amour fou burns bright through the Cold War, passing between 1950s Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia, and Paris, all shown in gorgeous, glassy black-and-white. A tale of state-sponsored folklore and capitalist poplore, and of a couple separated by politics, inborn character, and unfortunate twists of fate—an impossible love story, in impossible times. Followed by discussion with Pawel Pawlikowski. Cold War opens theatrically on December 21 at Film Forum

From the Polish Cultural Institute.