Andrzej Wajda - Since 1989

Since 1989

In 1990 Andrzej Wajda was honoured as the third director, after Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman by Felix - European Film Award for his lifetime achievement. In the early 1990s, he was elected a senator and also appointed artistic director of Warsaw's Teatr Powszechny. He continued to make films set during World War II, including Korczak (1990), a story about a Jewish-Polish doctor who takes care of orphan children, in The Crowned-Eagle Ring (1993) and Holy Week (1995) specifically on Jewish-Polish relations. In 1994 Wajda presented his own film version of Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot in the movie Nastasja,starring Japanese actor Tamasoburo Bando in double role of Prince Mishkin and Nasstasya, the film was beautifully photographed by Pawel Edelman, who became one of Wajda's great co-workers since that time. In 1996 the director went in a different direction with Miss Nobody, a coming-of-age drama that explored the darker and more spiritual aspects of a relationship between three high-school girls. In 1999 Wajda presented a great epic film Pan Tadeusz, based on the art of the Polish 19th-century romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz.

A year later, at the 2000 Academy Awards, Wajda was presented with an honorary Oscar for his contribution to world cinema; he subsequently donated the award to Kraków's Jagiellonian University.

In 2002 Wajda directed the comedy Revenge, a film version of his 1980s theatre production, with Roman Polanski in one of the main roles. In February 2006, Wajda received an honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 2007 Katyń was released, a well received film about the Katyn massacre, in which Wajda's father was murdered but the director also shows the dramatic situation of those who await for their relatives (mothers, wives and children). The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2008. Wajda followed it with Tatarak (Sweet Rush - 2009) with Krystyna Janda as a main character. It is partly based upon Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz short novel, there is also very important fragment taken from Janda's private life. Sweet Rush turns to be a sort of deep, calm and melancholic meditation about death and love. The film is dedicated to Edward Kłosiński, Janda's husband, a cinematographer and a long-time Andrzej Wajda's friend and co-worker who died of cancer the same year. For this film Andrzej Wajda was awarded by Alfred Bauer Prize at The Berlin Film Festival in 2009, recently he also got critics prize - Prix FIPRESCI during European Film Awards Ceremony. Currently Wajda is working on his latest film which would be the biography of Lech Wałęsa and the script has been written by Janusz Głowacki.

Andrzej Wajda has founded The Japanese Centre of Art and Technology "Manggha" in Krakow/Cracow (1994) and has also founded (2002) (along with great Polish film maker Wojciech Marczewski) and leads his own film school in which students take part in different film courses led by famous European film makers.