Urszula Antoniak
Director-writer
Antoniak began as a writer of movies and shorts for television. Her first feature, “Nothing Personal,” screened in competition at the Locarno Film Festival in 2009, nabbing the Golden Leopard for debut film and the actress award for Lotte Verbeek. It also took the Fipresci jury award and a special mention from the Ecumenical Jury. Her subsequent feature, “Code Blue” (2011) (1) and latest, “Nude Area” (2014), played at several international fests, including a Directors’ Fortnight berth in Cannes for the provocative “Code Blue.” The Polish-Dutch filmmaker has a few projects in the pipeline, including Polish production “Polish Gigolo” and “Run Dry,” an Irish-Dutch-Polish co-production.
Izabella Gustowska
Artist-filmmaker
Following a long career in multimedia and teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, where she also studied, Gustowska is known in the film world for her first documentary, “The Case of Josephine H.” (2), which preemed at the 2014 New Horizons Film Festival and recounts the story of painter Edward Hopper’s wife, Josephine, who searched for her own muse in New York City. The move to feature-length docs looks like an easy one for Gustowska, who was born in 1948 in Poznan, where she continues to work and live, and made a career in the arts, working in the fields of prints, painting, video installation and video performance. She has also run galleries and mounted many exhibitions, and staged her own one-woman shows.
Grzegorz Jaroszuk
Director-writer
A graduate of Lodz’s Polish National School, Jaroszuk saw his graduation film, “Frozen Stories” (2011), play at Sundance, pick up several fest awards including the Pianifica Prize in Locarno and the Grand Prix at the AFI Fest, and receive a nod for short film from the European Film Academy. “Kebab & Horoscope,” his first feature (which he also penned), preemed at Karlovy Vary and went on to several other fests including Gdynia and Reykjavik. New Europe Film Sales is handling the pic. His next film is “Story of a Sign,” which he is writing with Kinga Krzeminska.
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Katarzyna Klimkiewicz
Director-writer
Klimkiewicz knew she wanted to be a film director since she was a teenager and graduated from the Polish National Film School in Lodz. She’s part of a generation of filmmakers probing the aftermath of communism in Polish society. After her first feature, “Flying Blind” (2012), (3) and other successful short films, Klimkiewicz made the critically acclaimed short “La Isla” with Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor in 2013. The film won at the Huesca festival, making it eligible for the Academy Award for short film.
Julia Kolberger
Director-writer
Kolberger is an alumna of the Polish National Film School in Lodz, where she graduated from the directing program in 2009. Apart from working as an actress and assistant director on various projects, she wrote and directed the highly praised short film “The Easter Crumble,” which played at a number of fests worldwide, last year winning the Grand Jury Award in the Young Cinema Competition in Gdynia. Kolberger has yet to make her debut feature but her filmmaking future looks promising.
Borys Lankosz
Director-writer
Lankosz’s fiction and doc shorts picked up several fest prizes, but he had his breakthrough with his debut film, “Reverse” (5). Pic was part of the Variety Critics’ Choice sidebar in Karlovy Vary in 2010. “Reverse” was heralded as the forerunner of a “new wave” of Polish cinema. He has completed his upcoming and highly anticipated thriller, “A Grain of Truth,” an adaptation of the bestselling Polish novel by Zygmunt Miloszewski, and is in pre-production on his next project, the adaptation of another bestseller, “Dark, Almost Night.”
