The Divided World of Pawel Pawlikowski

Before Pawel Pawlikowski became one of Poland’s most influential filmmakers, he was a relatively unknown British one. Born in Warsaw in 1957, the director emigrated to England with his mother when he was just 14, initially under the impression that they were going on holiday. Overstaying their visas, Pawlikowski and his mother were soon exiled to West Germany, where they reunited with his father, a Jewish doctor, who had fled Communist Poland separately in the wake of an antisemitic government crackdown. Divorced at the time of his father’s exile, Pawlikowski’s parents reconciled and eventually settled in London. In 1977, Pawlikowski enrolled in the literature department at Oxford and later got an internship with the BBC, where he started producing documentaries that captured the collapse of the Soviet Union in real time.

In short, Pawlikowski’s life would make a great Pawel Pawlikowski film, and indeed it resembles several. Uncertain voyages, border checkpoints and a bewildering search for lost identities crop up across all of his movies to date, which range from gritty romances set in post-industrial Britain to elegiac period pieces recreating postwar Poland. But what makes this director remarkable is the stark bifurcation that cleaves his career in half, dividing his artistry like an invisible border. Pawlikowski’s first three features are English-language, BBC- or BFI-supported projects that are set in the present day and shot in color. In 2013, he moved back to Warsaw, tightened his aspect ratio and began making black-and-white movies, all set in the past. 

His latest, Fatherland (2026), premiered this month at Cannes, where it won him a second Best Director Award and was praised by critics for its depiction of characters struggling to keep their bearings amid a fractured homeland – this time, Germany – and disintegrating family. It’s the kind of story Pawlikowski’s own life has primed him to think deeply about, and it officially balances out the two halves of his oeuvre. Now 68, his filmography sits equally between color and chiaroscuro, and he lives with one foot planted firmly in both present and past. 

Last Resort (2000)

Pawlikowski’s first feature begins with a Russian woman and child arriving at the customs desk of a London airport. The woman, Tanya (Dina Korzun) announces she’s just there for vacation, but the framed photographs and sable furs in her suitcase suggest to authorities that she intends to stay longer. Falling back on a bogus asylum claim, she and her son Artiom (Artiom Strelnikov) are soon sent to a faded resort town called Stonehaven, which becomes a kind of purgatory, as they wait for their applications to be processed.

Pawlikowski’s conjuring of the post-industrial British beach town – which boasts a horribly depressing arcade and bingo parlor called Dreamland – suggests an experience of immigration that’s halfway between a casino and a jail, holding its characters in contempt even as it designs new ways to exploit them. In its depiction of social life in the absence of state welfare, Last Resort is unflinching, and pays patient attention to the choices made by characters with nothing left to lose. Having little else to do, the 14-year-old Artiom takes up drinking, smoking and theft with an abandon that makes the kids in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (2017) look like angels. If this story is somewhat based on Pawlikowski’s personal experience, as Artiom’s age in the film would suggest, it shows just how disorienting, even lethal, an adolescence in exile can be.

The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

Set in Paris and starring Ethan Hawke, Pawlikowski’s adaptation of Douglas Kennedy’s 2007 novel was meant to be a big international hit, and carries all the hallmarks of a European coproduction: a bookish protagonist, a simmering romance, a not-very-urgent mystery to solve. It premiered in Toronto to mixed reviews and largely disappeared after its festival run. What’s amazing is how Pawlikowski manages to imbue this most generic of forms, almost by accident, with all his cardinal preoccupations. Hawke’s character, Tom Ricks, may be a successful American novelist with the connections and capital to get along just fine in the City of Light, but his arrival in Paris immediately strips him of identity and status, with his sanity soon to follow.

Much like Last Resort, The Woman in the Fifth begins at border control, where Tom explains in perfect if accented French that he is visiting Paris to reunite with his daughter. Upon leaving the airport, he falls asleep on the bus and is robbed of all of his possessions, save for his passport, which he then surrenders to a hostel owner in exchange for a room. To earn his keep, the proprietor sets him up on a night shift watching a single CCTV monitor – an eerie flashback to the anonymous eyes of the state that monitored Tanya and Artiom in Stonehaven. These aspects are by far the most compelling ingredients of a film that quickly surrenders itself to an implausible romance between Tom and the mysterious Ania (Kristin Scott Thomas), a widowed Hungarian translator who lives in the fifth arrondissement. Their relationship is so magnetic that it hijacks the plot, and estranged daughters, lost papers and odd jobs are soon forgotten as the film hurtles toward its confusing and irrelevant ending.

Though far from a success, The Woman in the Fifth may have been the push that Pawlikowski needed to hone in on the specificity of his perspective. Abandoning the well-trodden path of American literary adaptations in photogenic European capitals, he moved to Warsaw and began working on the movie that would identify his style.

Ida (2013)

Of Jewish descent but raised Catholic in Communist Poland, Pawlikowski has a lot in common with the protagonist of Ida, which may well be remembered as his signature film. Growing up, Pawlikowski’s family celebrated Easter and rarely talked about the past, and he was shocked to eventually learn that his paternal grandmother died in Auschwitz. Such buried ghosts of Polish history are made vivid in Ida, which follows a young novitiate nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) as she embarks on a reckoning with the past before taking her vows, and discovers, through an estranged aunt, that her Catholic upbringing was an accident of fate: She was sent to a monastery as an infant to avoid detection by the Nazis, a hiding place where the rest of her family could not join her.

Set in 1962 and shot in silvery monochrome by cinematographer Łukasz Żal, this short and simple film continues Pawlikowski’s obsession with the false security of identity amid reversals of fate. But Ida is the first film that truly feels like it was made by him – its framing, sense of humor and pace all work together to create a precise atmosphere. What I find so interesting about this aesthetic homecoming is that Pawlikowski captures Poland far less vividly than the English environs of his earlier films, which were observed with a foreigner’s curiosity. Here, as in his next film, the landscape rarely ranges further than a forest road, a muddy street, or the dancefloor of a dimly lit barroom. Simple settings, which serve as the backdrop for a story with the clarity of a fable.  

Cold War (2018)

Inspired by his parents’ separation and reunion, Cold War tracks the devastating ways in which shifting borders and policies can estrange lovers and ruin lives. My favorite of Pawlikowski’s films to date, it takes place across several countries and decades, its only throughline being the burning passion of its two leads, which over the years all but ruins their lives.

Opening in the heady days of Poland’s post-World War II nation-building, Zula (Joanna Kulig) and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) meet at an audition for a traveling folk ensemble, whose musical repertoire is already being spiked with Communist propaganda. Going on tour means freedom, at the price of working as songbirds for the state. When, on a stopover in East Berlin, Viktor defects to the west, he is giving up his old life and making an all-or-nothing choice, but it’s still early enough that he doesn’t have to scale the Berlin Wall. Against his wishes, Zula fails to follow him.

Her split-second decision has consequences that go on to shape the rest of both of their lives, as the two lovers, desperate to be together, must make increasingly costly sacrifices to see each other while Eastern and Western Europe grow apart. For Zula, who is beautiful and brash, this involves seducing her surveillants and even marrying a man she doesn’t love to secure an exit visa. Unable to live without Wiktor but equally unable to adapt herself to life in the west, their attempts to reunite eventually lead Wiktor to run afoul of both his old and adopted homelands. It’s Pawlikowski’s most indemnifying vision to date of the fracture one faces when family and fatherland are swept away by history’s tides.