The director who looks like a star

Paweł Pawlikowski, now sixty-nine, is tall, dark, handsome, and charismatic, the exact profile for a leading man. Instead, he chose to direct from behind the camera, claiming he's a terrible actor who never knows what to do with his eyebrows.

“Oh, no, I'm a terrible actor. I never know what to do with my eyebrows.”

Fatherland opens in Sarajevo

Pawlikowski's latest film premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival in August. At eighty-two minutes, it's refreshingly brief, a story about Thomas Mann returning to Germany in 1949, accompanied by his daughter Erika.

“It's about history, how it repeats itself, about family, love, betrayal, and so on. And the good thing is, it's not very long.”

A trilogy on borders and belonging

Fatherland is the third in a triptych exploring geographical and spiritual borders. All three films, Ida, Cold War, and Fatherland, are under ninety minutes, shot in black and white, in Academy ratio, with minimal camera movement.

Ida wins the Oscar

In 2015, Pawlikowski's Ida won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The film tells of a Polish novice nun who discovers her Jewish heritage and searches for her past with her formidable aunt.

“Oh, God, how did I get here?”

Born in Warsaw to a mixed family

Pawlikowski was born in 1957 to Zula, a Catholic ballet dancer, and Wiktor, a secular doctor. He didn't learn until his teens that his father was Jewish and that his paternal grandmother died in Auschwitz.

“I didn't have a clue my father was actually Jewish.”

Movies and music shaped his childhood

In Communist Poland, Pawlikowski skipped school to watch Western films at morning screenings. His mother brought back Beatles records from England. A bandaged head didn't stop him from watching A Hard Day's Night in 1965.

“I was obsessed with movies when I was a kid. Every time we went skiving, I went to see movies.”

Poland's 1968 antisemitic purge

When Communist leader Władysław Gomułka lost power in 1968, he scapegoated Jews, splitting them into patriotic, Zionist, and cosmopolitan categories. His father was forced to leave Poland in 1969, traumatizing the family.

“Prasa kłamie, the press lies.”

Uprooted to England at fourteen

After his father's exile, Pawlikowski's mother remarried an Englishman and moved the family to London in 1971. At fourteen, speaking no English and resenting the displacement, he was sent to a Polish expatriate boarding school.

“My problem was not with my Jewish heritage. My problem was being Polish, in the West. That was bad enough.”

Cricket and Pina Bausch in Germany

Expelled from boarding school, Pawlikowski moved to Wuppertal, Germany, where his father had settled. There he discovered Pina Bausch's dance company and passed his exams, staying five years before returning to London for university.

“I loved her shows, though I had no idea what was going on.”

From Oxford to filmmaking

After starting a PhD on Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl, Pawlikowski fled to Turin. Back in England, he realized academia wasn't for him and signed up for a filmmaking workshop, his only formal training.

“Here was a medium in which I could combine all my failures.”

The BBC years and early documentaries

In 1986, Pawlikowski joined the BBC as a trainee assistant producer. He made documentaries on satanism, Northern Ireland, and Eastern European writers, including a film about the reclusive Russian writer Venedikt Yerofeyev.

“It was a cult book between me and my father.”

Serbian Epics in a war zone

Pawlikowski filmed Serbian Epics during the Bosnian War, gaining access to Radovan Karadžić's war cabinet by framing it as a literary documentary. The film shows Karadžić singing epic poetry while planning ethnic cleansing.

“I was being anthropological.”

Crossing into narrative cinema

Pawlikowski moved from documentaries to fiction films like Twockers, Last Resort, and My Summer of Love. These works blend documentary texture with invented stories, haunting rather than hectoring viewers.

A seven-year pause for grief

Pawlikowski married Russian pianist Irina in 1989. After she died in 2006, he paused filmmaking for seven years to raise their two children alone. The Woman in the Fifth marked his return in 2011.

“She knew 'From Moscow to Pietushki' by heart. It was a sign.”

Helena Wolińska-Brus becomes Wanda

Pawlikowski met Helena Wolińska-Brus, a Jewish woman who had been a Stalinist prosecutor. Years later, he created Wanda Gruz in Ida, a character inspired by her moral complexity and self-destruction.

“I just kept her in my back pocket, as an idea.”

Ida's breakthrough: stillness and limitation

Making Ida in Poland on a narrow budget, Pawlikowski rejected moving cameras and embraced headroom above characters. He fired his cinematographer and hired Łukasz Żal, beginning a lasting collaboration.

“Limit yourself, and that frees you up.”

Writing happens on set, not at a desk

Pawlikowski doesn't write scripts in advance. He collaborates with actors and develops dialogue during location scouting, rehearsal, and shooting. The filmmaking itself becomes part of the writing process.

“The filmmaking is part of the writing.”

Cold War ends with a double suicide

In Cold War, the lovers Zula and Wiktor swallow pills together in a ruined chapel and walk out of frame. The dedication reads: For my parents. Pawlikowski's own parents took their lives in 1989.

“Let's go to the other side. The view will be better there.”

Goethe's question: where is home?

Fatherland centers on Thomas Mann's return to Germany and his search for belonging. Goethe declared that the fatherland of the thinking man is nowhere and everywhere, a question that haunts all of Pawlikowski's work.

“The fatherland of the man who thinks without prejudice is nowhere and everywhere.”

A life lived between continents

Pawlikowski now divides his time between Hydra, Warsaw, and London. His films consistently explore displacement, borders, and the impossible search for home, themes rooted in his own restless, fractured biography.