Krzysztof Kieślowski (; 27 June 1941 – 13 March 1996) was a Polish film director and screenwriter. He is known internationally for Dekalog (1989), The Double Life of Veronique (1991), and the Three Colours trilogy (1993 –1994). Kieślowski received numerous awards during his career, including the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize (1988), FIPRESCI Prize (1988, 1991), and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (1991); the Venice Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize (1989), Golden Lion (1993), and OCIC Award (1993); and the Berlin International Film Festival Silver Bear (1994). In 1995, he received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
In 2002, Kieślowski was listed at number two on the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound list of the top ten film directors of modern times. In 2007, Total Film magazine ranked him at No. 47 on its "100 Greatest Film Directors Ever" list.
Early life
Kieślowski was born in Warsaw, Poland, the son of Barbara (née Szonert) and Roman Kieślowski. He grew up in several small towns, moving wherever his engineer father, a tuberculosis patient, could find treatment. He was raised Roman Catholic and retained what he called a "personal and private" relationship with God. At sixteen, he attended a firefighters' training school but dropped out after three months. Without any career goals, he then entered the College for Theatre Technicians in Warsaw in 1957 because it was run by a relative. He wanted to become a theatre director, but lacked the required bachelor's degree for the theatre department, so he chose to study film as an intermediate step.
Career
Leaving college and working as a theatrical tailor, Kieślowski applied to the Łódź Film School, which has Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda among its alumni. He was rejected twice. To avoid compulsory military service during this time, he briefly became an art student, and also went on a drastic diet to make himself medically unfit for service. After several months of avoiding the draft, he was accepted to the school's directing department in 1964, on his third attempt. He attended Łódź Film School until 1968 and, despite state censorship and interdiction on foreign travel, was able to travel around Poland for his documentary research and filming. Kieślowski lost his interest in theatre and decided to make documentary films.
1966–1980: Early work
Kieślowski's early documentaries focused on the everyday lives of city dwellers, workers, and soldiers. Though he was not an overtly political filmmaker, he soon found that attempting to depict Polish life accurately brought him into conflict with the authorities. His television film Workers '71, which showed workers discussing the reasons for the mass strikes of 1970, was only shown in a drastically censored form. After Workers '71, he turned his eye on the authorities themselves in Curriculum Vitae, a film that combined documentary footage of Politburo meetings with a fictional story about a man under scrutiny by the officials. Though Kieślowski believed the film's message was anti-authoritarian, he was criticized by his colleagues for cooperating with the government in its production. Kieślowski later said that he abandoned documentary filmmaking due to two experiences: the censorship of Workers '71, which caused him to doubt whether truth could be told literally under an authoritarian regime, and an incident during the filming of Station (1981) in which some of his footage was nearly used as evidence in a criminal case. He decided that fiction not only allowed more artistic freedom but could portray everyday life more truthfully.