Jerzy Skolimowski
Part of HBO Europe's Polish at Home series. Jerzy Skolimowski was in Sicily when the pandemic hit, where he was supposed to shoot his next film, Baltazar. He and his wife, Ewa Piaskowska, decided to stay on the Italian island. This film follows their experience during the pandemic.
An organised arts teacher has only one main problem in life, which is his father – a painter always going from one party to the next. When the father lives through his second heart attack and still refuses to change his lifestyle, Julius will have to find a way to influence his behaviour.
Valeria, young secretary of a producer, lives with an eccentric mother and secretly writes for a successful screenwriter, Alessandro. One day, she receives an unusual present from a stranger: it’s the plot of a movie about the mysterious but really-happened theft of a famous Caravaggio’s painting.
The lives of urbanites intertwine in a world where anything can happen at any time.
Storyline: In the summer of 1683, 300 000 Ottoman Empire's warriors begin the siege of Vienna. City's fall, will open way to conquer the Europe. The Sept 11 is the day of main battle between Polish cavalry under the King Jan III Sobieski and Turks.
When an unexpected enemy emerges and threatens global safety and security, Nick Fury, director of the international peacekeeping agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., finds himself in need of a team to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. Spanning the globe, a daring recruitment effort begins!
Krzysztof Komeda was a jazz pianist and film composer. With compositions like the lullaby for Rosemary's Baby (1968) by Roman Polanski, Komeda succeeded in writing his own chapter in the history of soundtracks. This documentary follows the life story of the composer by the means of his melodic sounds. It is a reflection on his soundtracks, which changed the common film scores forever. It is a contemporary document about the attitude to life in a time of social, political and cultural change after war, about work and exodus of Polish artists in the 50s and 60s. A story about how film music is created and how it affects people. Directors who worked with Komeda and who are also friends talk about him: Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Henning Carlsen and Andrzej Wajda. His wife, Zofia Komeda, and his sister, Irena Orlowska, recollect him.
A fascinating and absorbing documentary about the making of Jerzy Skolimowski's cult favourite, DEEP END, which was shot in 1970 as a US-German co-production on location in London and Munich. The film's two stars, Jane Asher and John Moulder-Brown, 23 and 17 years of age at the time respectively, meet for the first time in 40 years and discuss their on-screen and off-screen relationship in candid detail, while director/writer Skolimowski chronicles the production history from the writing of the script to the film's acclaimed first showing at the Venice Film Festival. Director of photography Charly Steinberger revisits some of the original locations and explains how he managed to shoot almost the entire film with a hand-held camera. Also on board are production designer Anthony Pratt, editor Barrie Vince, and actor Christopher Sandford, each of whom contributes his own version of how DEEP END was part of the sixties' "swinging London"; and at the same time tilted it on its head.
Short documentary about sequences removed from the film.
A Taliban soldier struggles to survive after he escapes his captors and flees into the Polish countryside.
The life of a math teacher and his loved ones turns into hell when a mysterious man reminds him of his former sin. What would you do, if you could decide about the punishment for your Persecutor, someone who hurt you or the people close to you? Would you seize the opportunity to make your own punishment? Sometimes judges can be accused. Some day everyone will answer for their sins. Some day has finally come!
A crematorium worker repeatedly breaks into a woman's house at night to help with housework.
A Russian teenager, living in London, dies during childbirth but leaves clues to a midwife in her journal, that could tie her child to a rape involving a violent Russian mob family.
The war between Iraq and Kuwait is just about to begin. While all foreigners are leaving Iraq, Pawel, a young Polish engineer is captured by the Iraqi Secret Service. His father, a retired secret service operative goes to Iraq to attempt to rescue him not knowing that he is secretly being used as bait. Now, two Polish secret agents have been assigned by the CIA to attempt a rescue mission. The stakes are high, but are they high enough to risk the life of one of the best officers?
Matthew comes to a seaside town to see a performance of his play, although even his brother Marc, who plays the role of Napoleon, does not know that Metthew is its author. Also in life Marc plays "Napoleon", becoming the leader of a group of local youth.
A young writer in 1939 Warsaw faces the conflict of acting his age or relapsing into childhood during the brink of World War II. Based on the famous novel Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz.
In 1840, a young Russian aristocrat, Dimitri Sanin, is returning home after a long tour of Europe. In Germany, he falls in love with a beautiful pastry shop girl, Gemma Rosselli, who soon starts sharing his feelings. They decide to get married and, in order to finance the wedding, Dimitri goes back to Russia to sell his family estate. Unfortunately he falls prey to a seductress, Princess Maria Nikolaevna, who pretends to be willing to buy his land to come nearer him. Now Sanin is in a fix: should he choose the pure Gemma or the evil but irresistible Maria?
Following the death of his father, a suburbanite runs away from home and winds up on Chicago's South Side. After being mugged, the boy befriends a young hustler and, after stealing a gangster's car, the two embark on an adventure down south in search of the hustler's estranged father.
An expatriate Russian dancer is on a plane forced to land on Soviet territory. He is taken to an apartment in which a black American who has married a Russian woman lives with her. He is to become a dancer for the Bolshoi again, but he wishes to escape, but can he trust the American?
An orphan weds an older man in circa-1900 New Zealand, then finds out he's a miser who spies on her.
A trio of robbers, two brothers and their twisted genius leader, invade a lightship, but don't reckon on the crew fighting back.
Alex Rodak (Michael York) is a Polish director in exile in London with his family, which includes an older teenage son Adam (Michael Lyndon) who is struggling with an identity crisis, his wife (Joanna Szerzerbic), and another son. Rodak is in the throes of putting together a major show about Poland and the politics of exile at a West End theater. His single-minded determination to succeed causes him to take advantage of others, and because of his need for backing, he turns to a low-life businessman (John Hurt) to bail him out. His wife is anything but happy about his behavior and dislikes this last decision even more. This is an interesting study of how a father and son become alienated in a conflict between cultural identity and its exploitation.
A Polish contractor, Nowak, leads a group of workmen to London so they can provide cheap labor for a government official based there. Nowak (Irons) has to manage the project and the men as they encounter the tempations of the West and loneliness and separation from their families. Nowak is the only one of the group who speaks English, and he uses this as a tool over his team. When the unrest in Poland leads to a military takeover, Nowak is faced with a much more difficult situation than he expected.
Georg Laschen leaves his family in West Germany to go work as a war correspondent in Beirut during the fights between Christians and Palestinians.
Bored while officiating a cricket match at a psychiatric hospital, Crossley tells Graves (a visitor) the tale of a mysterious stranger (also named Crossley) who invades the lives and house of a local musician and his wife. The stranger claims knowledge of real magic, which he uses to displace his host and dominate his wife. The musician must find a way to combat Crossley and his seemingly implacable powers. Graves doubts Crossley's claim that the story is true, and begins to believe that Crossley is actually one of the patients.
The main character has quit school, makes a living by taking pictures. He seduces a nurse who treated his head wound which he earned in a fight. They witness a hit-and-run driver killing a little girl on a sled. He builds up an elaborate trap by putting a doll dressed as a child down the hill in the path of a car. The man hits it and thinking that he hit a child - runs. Marek takes pictures of him and tries to blackmail him to use his car for a week. He wants to use the car to win back the nurse, who could not cope with his humors...
Based on a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, this English-language satirical drama details the experiences of Frank (John Moulder Brown), a young orphan who finds himself deep in the romantic clutches of his uncle's sensual wife. After Frank's parents die, he goes to live with his aunt Martha (Gina Lollabrigida) and uncle Charles (David Niven). Sexy Martha entices Frank into her embrace then wants him to kill her husband so that they can live off of his money. Frank wouldn't mind so much, but he really likes his uncle.
15-year-old Mike takes a job at the local swimming baths, where he becomes obsessed with an attractive young woman, Susan, who works there as an attendant. Although Susan has a fiancé, Mike does his best to sabotage the relationship, to the extent of stalking both her and her fiancé.
Based on satirical short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about a vain, egotistical Etienne Gerard, a French brigadier serving during the Napoleonic Wars. He thinks he's the best soldier and lover that ever lived and intends to prove it.
"Using the same, three times repeating dialogue – dramatic conversation between man and woman – Jerzy Skolimowski from Poland, Slovak director Peter Solan and Czech director Zbynìk Brynych shot three different stories. The result was an extraordinary experiment in the world cinema, which we can call an insight in the relationships of men and women of different age groups, an analysis of love and marriage of those who are at the beginning, in the middle or going towards the end of their life."
A fast-paced comedy about a young Belgian car nut and hairdresser's apprentice, his girlfriend, and their legal and illegal attempts to get a Porsche under him for his nearing debut race.
The footloose ennui of Poland’s postwar generation is captured to perfection in this jazzy chronicle of a draft-dodger’s final day of freedom. A slacker before there was a word for it, Andrzej (played by Skolimowski himself) drifts through a series of open-ended encounters with women following a wake-up argument with his pouting wife, and a long-delayed military physical (the film’s title derives from one of the questions). Skolimowski hoarded four years’ worth of the annual film footage allotment from his Lódz film school in order to create this first feature marked by compositional bravado and a trademark air of the absurd. -Barbara Scharres, Gene Siskel Film Center
On their way to an afternoon on the lake, husband and wife Andrzej and Krystyna nearly run over a young hitchhiker. Inviting the young man onto the boat with them, Andrzej begins to subtly torment him; the hitchhiker responds by making overtures toward Krystyna. When the hitchhiker is accidentally knocked overboard, the husband's panic results in unexpected consequences. This was the first feature directed by Roman Polanski.
In Little Hamlet, Skolimowski shows his predilection for immature or dwarfed characters, who would later populate his full-length films. Here a group of Warsaw proletarians meet in a destroyed building, consisting largely of stairs, littered with newspapers. A song from a record introduces the film characters as dwarfed versions of personas from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Hamles, Ofelka, Learcio. (EMK)
A drama set on New Year’s Eve 1999 in a luxurious hotel in the Swiss Alps where the lives of various guests and those who work for them intersect.
