Pawel Pawlikowski

Pawel Pawlikowski (born September 15, 1957, Warsaw, Poland) is a Polish-born British film director and screenwriter whose acclaimed works notably included Ida (2013), which won an Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Pawlikowski, who was baptized as a Roman Catholic but whose family was partly Jewish (his paternal grandmother died in the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz), spent most of his childhood in Warsaw. However, he left Poland in 1971 after his parents divorced, eventually relocating with his mother in England. After studying literature and philosophy at the University of Oxford, Pawlikowski became interested in filmmaking and in the mid-1980s began working in the British television industry. Among his earliest directorial efforts were documentaries funded by the BBC, including From Moscow to Pietushki (1990), about Russian writer and satirist Venedikt Yerofeyev, and Serbian Epics (1992), about the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, who was later indicted by a UN war crimes tribunal.

Pawlikowski made a strong debut as a feature film director with Last Resort (2000), a drama that chronicled the lives of asylum seekers in an English seaside resort town. The film earned him the 2001 Carl Foreman Award for the most-promising newcomer from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). His follow-up effort—My Summer of Love (2004), about a romantic relationship between two young women in rural Yorkshire—was also honoured at the BAFTA Awards, winning the 2005 Alexander Korda Award for best British film.

When Pawlikowski’s wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2006, he put his directing career on hold to care for her and their two young children. She died months later, and it was five years before Pawlikowski returned to filmmaking, during which time he taught at the National Film and Television School near London. His next film, The Woman in the Fifth (2011), a psychological thriller, received generally positive reviews. Pawlikowski then directed the acclaimed Ida (2013). Set in Poland in 1962, Ida follows a novitiate Roman Catholic nun who—after discovering that she was born Jewish—sets out on a journey with her last living relative, a debauched aunt, to find out the truth about her parents’ deaths during the Nazi occupation of Poland. The beautifully shot black-and-white drama became the first Polish film to receive the Oscar for best foreign-language film (2015). Its other honours included the BAFTA Award for best film not in the English language (2015).

Pawlikowski next directed and cowrote Zimna wojna (2018; Cold War), which was inspired by his parents’ relationship. The drama was well received, and Pawlikowski was named best director at the Cannes film festival.