Marcel Łoziński – profile

Marcel Łoziński was born in Paris, in the turbulent times of the Second World War in 1940. After the war, his family returned to Poland. After several years of working as sound editor in the Warsaw Documentary Film Studio, Marcel enrolled at the National Film School in Łódź in 1967. He finished his studies in 1971 (although he only received his degree several years later). In the same year, he made his debut film A Change/Zmiana and Seen from Underneath/Widziane z dołu, joining the ranks of the new generation of Polish directors, such as Tomasz Zygadło, Wojciech Wiszniewski, Paweł Kędzierski and Krzysztof Kieślowski.
As one of the most active and most loud documentarists of the generation, deeply unsatisfied with the situation of growing social paranoia caused by the deepening discrepancy between the reality they experienced and the “reality” that was propagated, he was logically followed by the regime’s watchdogs. His struggle with the censorship, which affected the presenting of most of his films made in that period, culminated in his withdrawal from the scene after the events in the Gdansk Shipyard in 1981 and the declaration of the martial law in the country.
After the final fall of the Eastern Bloc, Łoziński had to restore his filmmaking career, which he managed soon, primarily by his now classic films 89 mm from Europe/89 mm od Europy and Anything Can Happen/Wszystko może się przytrafić. The two films share not only great international recognition (among others, the former was nominated for the Academy Awards) but also the protagonist, the director’s little son Tomek, who spontaneously and intuitively enters into the interaction with his surroundings in two diverse situations. In the 1990s, the focus of Łoziński’s films changes, like the one of his generation colleagues; from critical probes into the life of the society in the 1970s, through a period of silence, his attention shifts to more intimate, existential themes dedicated to the general constants of the human fate. As to his filmmaking method of exploring his themes, Łoziński says the following:
“I’m not interested in pure documentary film nor in pure feature film. When making a documentary film, you’re just watching, while in case of a feature film, you never go beyond the border of prefabricated plotlines. That is why I’m trying to employ the methods of both genres. Somebody once said that when making a film, one has to find balance between one’s idea and the things that arise directly from reality. In this way, I usually try to intervene in the reality around me and then openly follow what is born out of this intervention.”