Moral Mazes of Krzysztof Kieślowski

News of the death of Krzysztof Kieślowski in 1996 at only 54 years of age came only a scant few years after the filmmaker had been discovered by audiences and championed by critics far afield of his native Poland, where he’d first distinguished himself in the early 1970s with a series of films in which elements of documentary and fiction filmmaking freely intermingled. At odds with his homeland’s repressive communist regime up to its final dissolution, Kieślowski seemed poised to emerge as an equally trenchant critic of the capitalist free-for-all that followed—certainly White, an entry in his celebrated Three Colors trilogy, a contemplation of the emerging united Europe, suggests as much—but what he did manage to accomplish in the three decades of his working life is more than enough to assure him a place among the towering figures of late 20th-century European cinema. Demotic but never pandering, drawn like a moth to flame towards the impossible ethical dilemma—most notably in his 10-episode chef d’oeuvre, Dekalog—and committed to seeing the contemporary world with total lucidity, Kieślowski’s absence has been dearly felt these last 30 years, though through his films he will never really leave us.

Co-presented with the Polish Cultural Institute New York.