From Kieślowski to Munk, Polish film has a mighty past. Yet can today’s auteurs survive the interference of a government hostile to ‘whingeing, arty stuff’ that shows the world as ambiguous’? • Triumph from tragedy: how Greece’s theatre roared out of a national crisis It is a cold, misty afternoon in Warsaw and I am having tea with the Oscar-winning film-maker Paweł Pawlikowski in the elegant cafe belonging to the Hotel Bristol – a building that miraculously escaped the destruction of the second world war and the Warsaw Uprising. He is perennially exasperated by a political establishment he considers reactionary and philistine. Yet this same government is intensely aware of Poland’s cinematic tradition and the international prestige it brings. “In Poland now,” he says, “there is a tendency to centralise power and get rid of things that are associated with the ‘elites’ or the ‘intelligentsia’. The ruling party’s electoral heartland is mainly in small towns and the countryside, so they’re not too worried about our kind of cinema. They are more concerned with the state media, which has a huge reach in the provinces. They have turned it into a tube for grotesque bilious propaganda. They are also interfering with theatres and museums that don’t toe their ideological line. Film-makers are inevitably free spirits, and they’re finding it much more difficult to co-opt us.” Continue reading...
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