Krzysztof Kieslowski

Influential Polish writer-director Krzysztof Kieslowski was born on this day in Warsaw in 1941. His career started out by accident, when he dropped out of firemen’s training school at 16 after just three months. With no clear direction in life he entered the College for Theatre Technicians in Warsaw in 1957 because it was run by a relative. To avoid military service, Kieslowski briefly became an art student. After several months of successfully avoiding the draft, he was accepted to the Lodz Film Academy on his third attempt, the same school that produced Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda. Although he wasn’t overtly political, Kieslowski’s documentaries, like Workers ’71, caused him much conflict with Polish authorities. Most famous are his foreign made films such as The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and his Trois Couleurs trilogy. In 1994 he was nominated for two Academy Awards for Three Colors: Red . Kieslowski died on March 13, 1996, at the age of 54, during open-heart surgery following a heart attack.

Factoid: Kieslowski was considered part of the “Cinema of Moral Anxiety,” a loose movement which grouped together several Polish directors, including Andrzej Wajda, who aimed to depict the conditions of Poles under communism.