Thessaloniki International Film Festival

Last night at TIFF 2010, Dorota Kedzierzawska was awarded the prestigious Golden Alexander award just before her screening of her film 'Time to Die' (2007).

"Dorota Kedzierzawska holds a place as one of the most original Polish filmmakers to emerge after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Unflinching in her commitment, she has quietly amassed an oeuvre that is cohesive and faithful to its worldview and its distinct visual aesthetics, largely created through her later collaboration with director of photography Arthur Reinhart, but evident even in her earliest work. The stories she tells are frequently based on some snippet of life, an article, a police report, or an image that forms part of her own experience of the world. She appreciates the ostensibly trivial, the ordinary, those small events that fall through the cracks of our jaded radars; hers is a human and humane cinema that focuses on the lives of those rejected by the system and its various faces. These characters, nevertheless, cannot be mistaken for victims; despite the gloom that often surrounds them, Kedzierzawska’s creations – as a rule, women and children – are resilient and they endure. The infanticide in Nothing is the act of a desperate woman, but it is also an act of defiance, of throwing violence against the violence of the world. The people in Kedzierzawska’s films are fueled by life; they have faith and maintain a joyous curiosity for the world. Her children protagonists especially possess a raw, tough brilliance: they are unbreakable in the face of adversity, their fierce imaginations intact even in the direst of circumstances. In I Am, runaway Kundel, unwanted by his mother and having escaped from an orphanage, is able to practically and psychologically create a new world for himself, hidden in an old barge and replete with the makings of a real living. The fine details that make up the director’s cinematic universe are there even in her first feature (made for Polish TV), The End of the World: the surrounding bleakness that serves as an unvarnished landscape for people’s stories; the reliance, not on dialogue, but on cinematic language, such as tender close-ups, the play of people’s eyes with the light, the glances that are the most faithful depictions of emotion; the spirit with which she focuses on her characters. None perhaps of her convictions is more evident than her compassion for the people she portrays and the profound respect she has for their choices."
written by, Lilly Papagianni

Pictures by Vanessa McMahon

STAY TUNED FOR PERSONAL INTERVIEW - VANESSA MCMAHON WITH DOROTA COMING SOON!!!