The Balcony Movie
The Museum of the Moving Image in New York will host a retrospective of eight documentaries by Polish filmmaker Pawel Łoziński, whose The Balcony Movie is in the running for a European Film Award and has been entered into the Oscar 2023 race for top Feature Doc. The MOMI programme runs December 2-4.
The programme, titled “In the Neighbourhood: The Films of Paweł Łoziński”, will feature nine films, including one made by the director’s father.
In addition to the latest The Balcony Movie (2021) audiences will get the chance to see Birthplace (1992), The Sisters(1999), The Way It Is (1999), The Ukrainian Cleaning Lady (2002), Chemo (2009), Father and Son (2013) and You Have No Idea How Much I Love You (2021). The political documentary How It’s Done (2006), made by Pawel’s Oscar-nominated father Marcel Łoziński, will also feature.
Director, screenwriter, cinematographer, and producer Łoziński was born in 1965 in Warsaw. A graduate of the Directing Department at the Łódź Film School, he is the author of more than 20 documentaries that have won numerous awards at Polish and international festivals.
“He makes emotionally charged documentary films that look at people in a highly intimate way,” writes representative organisation Polish Docs.
The New York Polish Cultural Institute adds: “Paweł Łoziński’s nonfiction films don’t merely observe; they lean forward, they inquire, they connect. Often it’s the director doing the asking and connecting, whether it’s with his Warsaw neighbors or his own father, the Oscar-nominated Polish master Marcel Łoziński. At other times there are proxies, as with the incisive therapist in You Have No Idea How Much I Love You, or subjects leading one another down revealing pathways of conversation in Chemo and Birthplace.”
“These engagements, inquiries, and seemingly casual encounters are energized by the filmmaker’s formal rigor: defining compositional frameworks, adherence to conscribed locations, set durational parameters. Yet these films are anything but clinical or predetermined. His practice assumes limitations and imperfections that can be accepted, fought, or worked around—like how one might (and probably ought to) approach other humans, and much like how Łoziński himself treats the people in his films.”
The European Film Awards will be handed out December 10 in Reykjavík. The nominees in the European Documentary Category are:
- The Balcony Movie by Paweł Łoziński (Poland)
- A House Made of Splinters by Simon Lereng Wilmont (Denmark/ Sweden/ Finland/ Ukraine)
- Girl Gang by Susanne Regina Meures (Switzerland)
- Mariupolis 2 directed by Mantas Kvedaravičius (Lithuania/ France/ Germany)
- The March On Rome by Mark Cousins (Italy)
