Home - Polish Cultural Institute

Dorota Kedzierzawska, one of Poland's foremost women directors, with a rare gift for working with children (as in her debut feature "Devils, Devils", acclaimed at the Toronto Film Festival in 1991) will appear in person for discussion following the showings of her latest film - "I AM" - at the New York Film Festival (which runs from September 23 till October 9). In her new film Kedzierzawska captures in an essentially harsh story the beauty of a friendship between two equally lonely children.

From the New York Film Festival program:

I Am
An 11-year-old Polish boy, nicknamed Mongrel with casual cruelty, escapes from his bleak foster home yearning to be back with his hard-drinking mother. But she doesn't want him; he's a nuisance who gets in the way of her bad romances. So he sets up a patchy homestead of his own on an abandoned river barge, where he is befriended by a little girl no less lonely for having a real family and house to return home to at night. As she showed in Nothing (1998) and especially in The Crows (1994), Dorota Kedzierzawska has a rare gift for working with children, allowing them to be themselves yet also, safely, wholly invented characters within her troubling dramas. And while she draws from them performances of great naturalism and flashes of pathos-free wit, her frequent artistic collaborator Arthur Reinhart offsets the essential harshness of the story with cinematography of disconcerting loveliness. 100 min. Poland, 2005.

Shown with
Lâl (Dirk Schaefer, Germany, 2005, 17 min).
Istanbul: a German psychoanalyst who believes that "normalcy is an illusion" reunites with her ex-terrorist daughter after a long period of estrangement.

Dorota Kedzierzawska was born in Lodz and studied at the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow and the Polish National Film School in Lodz. She directed several short films including Agnes (80), The Egg (82) and Gucia (85) and the television movie The End of the World (88) before directing her first feature, Devils, Devils (91). Her other features include Crows (94), Nothing (98) and I Am (05).

For an extended essay on Dorota Kedzierzawska written in 2001 by Ewa Mazierska, click HERE