Platinum Lions

This year a special award for lifetime achievement is going to the two Masters of Cinema,Tadeusz Konwicki and Roman Polański.
Tadeusz Konwicki
Born in 1926, Tadeusz Konwicki began his career as a writer. After fifty years of creating, he became one of the finest prose writers in the history of Polish literature. However, just after the Polish October '56, in a crucial moment, when he wanted to critically review the socialist realist episode, Konwicki took a camera and for 30 years - since 1958 till 1989 - he remained faithful to it. During this time he shot 6 feature-length films. One might add "only", but in fact each of Konwicki's films is a remarkable phenomenon - different from the ordinary Polish cinematography, and in some cases discovering new paths for it.

Roman Polański
His feature-length debut, "Knife in the Water", won the first Polish Oscar nomination, but shortly after its shooting, Polański left the communist Poland. Initially he worked in the west of Europe and at the end of the 1960s he moved to the USA. He made his mark as the director and screenwriter, shooting an excellent satanist thriller, "Rosemary's Baby", and a picture regarded as one of the best films of the 1970s American cinema,"Chinatown". Among the well-known films by Polański we can find a sophisticated melodrama, "Tess", an intriguing "Frantic", and a sadomasochistic erotic thriller, "Bitter Moon". In 2002, Polański won an Oscar for the Best Director ("The Pianist").



Jury of 36th PFF
This year the competition films will be judged by the two juries.
The best Polish film of the 36th PFF will be chosen by the international jury with nine members led by Paweł Pawlikowski, a director and screenwriter ("Last Resort", "My Summer of Love", "The Woman in the Fifth") living in Oxford. Apart from Paweł Pawlikowski the jury will consist of:

Ryszard Lenczewski - camera operator;
Ari Folman - director and screenwriter;
Maja Ostaszewska - actress;
Mariusz Treliński - opera, film, and theatre director;
Walter Kirn - writer, essayist, literary critic;
Leszek Możdżer - pianist and composer;
Robert McMinn - Vice President of Lakeshore Entertainment, producer, expert in the development of screenplays and projects;
Ludmila Cvikova - Programmer of the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, film theoretician.

Films of students and film school graduates will be judged by the jury consisting of:

Paula Markovitch (chairperson) - screenwriter and director ("Lake Tahoe", "El Premio"),
Paweł Borowski - director and screenwriter ("Zero"),
Arkadiusz Jakubik - actor, director, and screenwriter ("Simple Story about Love"),
Paweł Sala - director, screenwriter, playwright ("Mother Teresa of Cats").