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Paweł Pawlikowski: Cinema is a Bridge Between My Interests and Failures

The director whose film FATHERLAND opened the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival held a masterclass at the Festival Center (Bosnian Cultural Center).

“Films have always been an escape from life,” Paweł Pawlikowski said during his Masterclass at the Sarajevo Film Festival. Yet there is little sense of escape in that sentence. On the contrary, his entire artistic journey has been marked by a return to reality, through documentary and fiction, history, love, politics and the people shaped by the times in which they live. In a conversation moderated by Bosnian-Australian writer Enis Čehić, Pawlikowski spoke about his beginnings, documentary filmmaking, the Balkans, his directing process and his belief that stories should remain open enough to continue living long after the final frame.

Born in Warsaw in 1957, Pawlikowski left Poland with his mother at the age of 14. After living in Germany, he moved to the United Kingdom, where he studied literature and philosophy at Oxford. Literature and poetry were his first great loves, but film, as he recalled, came before an academic career. He never completed his doctorate, deciding that it was unnecessary. In the meantime, he was searching for his own voice, even through music, admitting that he had also been an “unsuccessful musician.”

Film, as he describes it, eventually gave him a way to bring together all those different interests and “all my failures.” The BBC opened the door to the film industry for him, and he approached it almost strategically; pretending to be interested in television while in fact being drawn to cinema.

“The BBC was a much more open institution then, and there was more room for someone to come with an idea and actually try to make it. Through Nigel Williams, I was given the opportunity to present my ideas for documentaries. One of those films was made with the support of the BBC, won an Emmy and, most importantly for me at the time, opened the door to bigger productions and more serious work in the industry. The BBC was really my gateway into the film industry,” Pawlikowski recalled with a smile, adding that filmmaking at the time also had a very practical side to it; it was, as he put it, easy money.

His documentary period is particularly important in understanding the filmmaker who would eventually become one of the most acclaimed voices in European cinema. During the Masterclass, an excerpt from a film Serbian Epics was screened.

Pawlikowski gradually moved from documentary into fiction, but the documentary instinct never disappeared. Realism itself, however, is not what interests him most. He is more drawn to the possibility of reshaping reality through atmosphere, character and everything that remains unspoken.

His directing principle is simple, yet demanding: to write scenes that imply a great deal without explaining anything. Pawlikowski prefers a small number of characters, a strong concentration on one thing and protagonists who are internally conflicted. For him, a screenplay is not a locked structure. He changes it, leaves it open and allows time to intervene.

With Ida, he returned to Poland and to a world that, as he put it, carried a sense of history he had missed in England. Carrying family photographs and memories with him, he returned to people whose behaviour, tragedies, landscapes and identities had been shaped by history. The film also brought together the sounds of his childhood; the pop music he listened to as a boy and the jazz that defined the 1960s. Ida went on to win the Academy Award and became the first Polish film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Cold War deepened his interest in a divided Europe, love and people separated by history. Out of that same fascination came Fatherland, the film with which Pawlikowski opened the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival.

For FATHERLAND, he said, he read biographies of Thomas Mann and became interested in making a historical drama about Europe at a moment when one order was collapsing and another was beginning to emerge. He was not interested merely in the monumental figure of the great writer, but in entering his mind and attempting to understand an era through one individual. Mann, he admitted, was at times close to him in the way he thought.

And so Pawlikowski’s cinematic world; from the wartime Balkans to post-war Poland and a divided Europe; repeatedly returns to the same place: the individual trying to understand his own life while history changes around him. Pawlikowski does not search for grand answers. Instead, he leaves his stories open, like films that do not truly end with the closing credits, but continue to exist in the memory of the viewer.