Polish filmmaker Paweł Łoziński can barely contain his pride as he talks to Business Doc Europe about the new Marcel Łoziński International Documentary Award, created to commemorate his late father, a lion of Polish documentary. Marcel passed away in August 2025.
The aim of the award is not only to commemorate one of Poland’s greatest documentary filmmakers but also “to affirm that his inventive approach to cinematic language lives on and continues to find successors around the world,” wrote the award’s instigators, Kraków Film Festival and the Polish Documentary Film Directors Guild, when it was announced in February 2026.
On June 3 the award will be handed, for the first time, to Cuban filmmaker David Bim for his debut effort To the West in Zapata.
“I’m very proud and happy. I am doubly pleased that the memory of Marcel and his films will be preserved, and that filmmakers from all over the world will have the chance to receive this distinction for their original and unconventional view of the world,” Paweł tells BDE. “I am deeply grateful to the Krakow Film Foundation for the idea behind this award, and to the Polish Film Institute for bringing it to life so quickly. I am convinced that thanks to this award, Marcel’s way of thinking about documentary film – as a work of art capable of building bridges between people in times of fear and loneliness – has a chance to endure.”
“We are living in a fascinating but also difficult moment for documentary filmmakers. Sometimes it is hard to survive and remain faithful to one’s own perspective on the world in the face of the dictatorship of platforms and algorithms,” he adds.
Marcel received an Academy Award nomination for 89mm From Europe (1994), was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and a lecturer at the Wajda School. A recipient of numerous prestigious national and international awards, he was decorated with the Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture. He maintained a lifelong association with the Krakow Film Festival – as a multiple award winner, a long-standing member of the Programme Board of the Krakow Film Foundation, and the recipient of the festival’s highest honour, the Dragon of Dragons Award, bestowed upon him in 2016 for his lifetime achievement and contribution to the development of world documentary cinema.
In 2013 Marcel featured in Paweł’s Father and Son, in which a car journey from Poland to Paris transforms into a highly poignant odyssey of confession and reflection.
Pawel explains his rationale, alongside fellow jury members Maria Campana Ramia and Sergei Loznitsa, in choosing David Bim’s To the West in Zapata as inaugural prize-winner. In the film, Landi and Mercedes live in Cuba’s Zapata swamp, a biosphere reserve. To feed their sick child, Landi must secretly hunt crocodiles, leaving his wife and son behind for days on end…
“It was a wonderful group of documentary experts selected by the Krakow Film Foundation,” says Paweł. “We watched twelve interesting documentaries from around the world that had been specially selected for us. Choosing was not easy. I am certain that Marcel would have liked this modest but aesthetically very consistent film, built from beautiful painterly images. Rough and black-and-white, it was filmed very close to its great protagonists, yet without violating their intimacy. It is a documentary about the power of love, something essential that allows the protagonists to endure the hardships of their lives. It has everything my father loved and valued in films. It is a pity that he cannot see it.”
Paweł has himself assumed the status of one of Poland’s leading documentarians, as evidenced by the desperately affecting You Have No Idea How Much I Love You, which comprises a psychotherapeutic encounter between a daughter a mother, and a therapist, and his sublime The Balcony Movie, in which he communicates from on-high with passers-by during lockdown.
How does Paweł assess the influence of his dad on his own filmmaking, and if he were to list three key factors, what would these be?
“Three is far too few! First of all, my entire family home revolved around his films and his work,” he says. “I became a director through observation and osmosis. My father believed that film, especially documentary film, was the greatest of all arts. So in a way, I never really had a choice.”
“What certainly shaped me was his precise, analytical, and meticulous way of thinking about film structure,” he continues. “His attention to every detail. He never compromised. He usually conceived his films on paper first, and only then pointed his camera at reality, trying to capture what he had imagined. This is actually where we differ: I prefer to find a good place or an interesting character and simply observe. I follow external reality more closely – I follow the world itself rather than a structure that emerges from within me.”
The conversation moved on to the high quality of Polish documentary (for which Marcel can take much credit), and why the local doc industry has evolved into a European powerhouse.
“I believe it is still absolutely wonderful and recognizable all over the world. Perhaps because it emerged from cinema rather than television. Paradoxically, censorship during the communist era also helped, because it forced directors to tell their stories indirectly, using metaphors,” says Paweł.
“Great credit belongs to filmmakers such as Kazimierz Karabasz, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and of course my father. Marcel educated entire generations of students who today win awards at the world’s most prestigious festivals. He taught them not only how to formally construct films, but also how to use them to express their thoughts and emotions. And how to remain psychologically close to their subjects without crossing the boundaries of intimacy. To the West, in Zapata, the film that won Marcel’s award for the first time this year, could easily have been made by one of his students,” he further stresses.
“Today, thanks to the Polish Film Institute, Poland has quite a good system for financing documentaries at every stage, from development and production to distribution. But perhaps the most important factor is the passion and determination of young documentary filmmakers to tell stories about the world around them, a world that often affects them deeply, irritates them, and demands a response.”
“They are doing what generations before them did: describing their world in the hope that it will become more understandable to viewers, and inspire less fear,” Paweł ends.
