Lech Majewski has been named recipient of this year’s Special Camerimage Directing Award, recognizing his unique cinematic vision as well as his directorial devotion to making his film projects unique visual experiences that transcend geography, human fragility, and time itself.
Among Majewski’s works, one can find a diversity of ideas and themes proving he never stopped looking for new ways of fuelling his artistic curiosity. In 1989’s Prisoner of Rio, a tale about Ronald Biggs, one of the perpetrators of the English Great Train Robbery, he worked with the real-life Biggs and blurred the borders of reality, fiction, and art. In 1992’s Gospel According to Harry, produced together with David Lynch via Propaganda Films, Majewski reused the tried biblical motifs in the scenery of the Californian desert to tell a surreal story of the paradise lost. In 1999’s Wojaczek, screened at dozens of high-profile film festivals, the director took an obscure and tragic, yet incredibly talented Polish poet and made him the subject of an ironic, deadpan cinematic game with the convention of a biopic as well as with the perception of art as such. While in 2000’s Angelus, an intimate epic about 1950s Silesian coalminers living in an occult commune, which was called by many a hallucinating film experience, Majewski has proven his imagination as a storyteller concerned with the people excluded by the mainstream whose lives can still serve as haunting and humbling lessons for the modernity.
Beyond being a film director, Majewski is also an acclaimed painter, a talented composer, a sublime writer, and a poet. His installations were exhibited throughout the world, while the operas and theatre plays he directed evoked a variety of reactions in people from different classes, cultures, races, and religions. His most recent project, Valley of the Gods, with a cast headlined by Josh Hartnett, John Malkovich, Bérénice Marlohe, Keir Dullea and John Rhys-Davies, explores an idiosyncratic and mysterious vision of America and is set to provoke discussion everywhere it is shown, including at a special screening and director’s introduction at the 27th EnergaCamerimage, the festival which runs from Nov. 9-16. Majewski will be presented the Camerimage Directing Award during a special ceremony at the fest.
