Paweł Pawlikowski

Paweł Pawlikowski is a Polish filmmaker. Born in Warsaw, in his late teens he learned that his paternal grandmother was Jewish and had been murdered in Auschwitz. At the age of 14, he and his mother left Poland for London and then Germany. His career began in the late 1980s, and was dominated by experimental and sometimes controversial documentaries until the turn of the millennium: these included Moscow-Petushki, an adaptation of the cult novel by Russian author Venedikt Erofeev, and Serbian Epics (1992), a study of Serbian poetry made during the Bosnian War. He moved into feature fiction filmmaking in 2000 with Last Resort. His most successful films are Ida (2013), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Cold War (2018), a romance loosely based on the life stories of his own parents.