When Paweł Pawlikowski arrived in the UK at the age of fourteen, he initially thought he and his mother had come on holiday. That changed on his first day at school, when he became the ‘Other’ – a Pole, an Eastern European, an immigrant who did not speak the language of his peers. From then on, his life was marked by dislocation and a lack of any real anchor. He completed his secondary education in West Germany, studied literature and philosophy at Oxford, and then travelled the world as a documentary filmmaker, capturing glimpses of real people’s lives, political regimes and the stories that unfolded around them.

At the turn of the millennium, he turned to feature filmmaking with Last Resort (2000), revisiting his own youthful experience of being thrust into an unfamiliar world – one shaped by the collision between East and West, personal distress and the impersonal machinery of British bureaucracy. The film also explores the hope of a new life set against the bleak reality of being trapped in limbo while awaiting asylum. All the more relevant in today’s post-Brexit context, it portrays life on the margins of society with a documentarian’s immediacy.

Although its visual style, characterised by close-ups and an unsteady handheld camera, now stands in stark contrast to the carefully composed, stylised images of his later works, Last Resort already anticipates themes that would become constants in Pawlikowski’s oeuvre: the experience of foreignness, the search for identity and entrapment in the social and political circumstances that shape our lives.

His next feature film, My Summer of Love (2004), similarly explores the tension between the desire to escape and the inability to break free from one’s social milieu. Set in the English countryside, the film centres on the friendship between two girls from diametrically opposed class backgrounds, brought together by the boredom of summer and a shared desire for escapism. They seek refuge in fantastical realities, acting out different versions of themselves. But this imagined world soon becomes a realm of manipulation and destruction, shaped by an imbalance of power. Ultimately, the class divide continues to define the girls, even within the world they seek to reinvent.

A further formal shift in the director’s oeuvre comes with his return to the country and language of his childhood. In Ida (2013), the first feature film he shot in Poland, Pawlikowski explores an entirely different cinematic language: colour and a wide panoramic aspect ratio give way to black-and-white photography and a square 4:3 frame, while a moving camera is replaced by static shots in which empty space often yawns around the characters, visually underscoring the protagonist’s erased and unknown family history.

Here, too, identity remains the central thematic thread, though it is no longer merely personal but inextricably linked to the family’s past and to broader European history. As Ida’s origins are gradually uncovered, questions of historical memory and guilt come to the fore, forcing her to reconsider her faith, her freedom and the choices that will shape her future.

However, the director’s most personal film is Cold War (2018), inspired by the turbulent love story of his parents, who met in 1949 amid the ruins of post-war Poland. We follow their tumultuous romance from Poland to East Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris, while the black-and-white cinematography and 4:3 aspect ratio – which in Ida conveyed torpor and restraint – now complement the narrative’s dynamic rhythm, infused with music and dance. And yet, despite constant movement between countries and attempts to escape social and political constraints, freedom remains elusive here too. This time, however, the themes of alterity and the inability to belong extend to post-war Europe as a whole.

Veronika Zakonjšek

Provocative. Naked young women, a gun lying next to a lover, black smoke billowing from a chimney in the short film Intervju s ljubavnicom (Interview with a Mistress). And daring, when interweaving footage of personal tragedies with obituaries and photographs from porn magazines in Mali oglasi (Classified Ads). The shots are exceptionally short, but even shorter in the experimental film Proces (The Process) – images of the shortest possible duration, a single frame. Čistilište (Purgatory) is politically incorrect, reducing society to the setting of a municipal rubbish dump. As well as exceptionally poetic: in Theme 1, life’s full spectrum of nuances is captured on a bench in a city park, in just three framings.

Played by Stole Aranđelović, Gozdar, the protagonist of Žena s krajolikom (The Woman with the Landscape), displays these same characteristics: in uniform, with a rifle, strong, rough-hewn and aloof, yet inherently sensitive, he is an artist who communicates with the world through naïve painting. He will have to get used to the unwritten rules of the community. Ivica Matić began writing the screenplay when he met Špela Rozin, initially devising a story about an actress who had come to die in a remote village in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over time, the screenplay evolved into a universal story about art and freedom. The film is bold in its purity, precision and wealth of metaphors, yet remains down-to-earth, human and witty.

Director Matić encapsulated the essence of Bosnia: the beauty of the gentle landscape, bordered by wooden fences, haystacks and solitary trees. These perfect compositions of nature are interspersed with farmers carrying satchels, herding sheep, as horses gallop across the bare meadows. From afar, we hear the villagers singing mirthful folk songs about love. However, the embroidery on bedlinen, the interiors, the intricate architecture of the houses, the shepherds’ huts – everything is authentic, just like the facial features and dispositions of the characters.

Matić wanted to shoot a feature-length fiction film on 35 mm film, using only wide shots. One can imagine how majestic these landscapes would have been, captured with telephoto lenses – flat, almost devoid of perspective, much like the paintings of the naïve artist Ismet Ajanović. In his works, figures sometimes become all but indistinguishable amidst fences, pastures and sparsely scattered houses. When the idea of a film intended for theatrical release fell through, Sarajevo Television, where Matić worked as a cameraman, came to the rescue.

The channel made it possible to produce a television film on a modest budget, shooting on 16 mm film. He chose Karpo Godina as his director of photography.

In the film’s final shot, a procession of mourners is visible in the distance. Then a woman, a widow, enters the foreground. “He left just as he came,” she says, “in the blink of an eye.” This is the only shot in which Ivica wanted to be behind the camera. He sensed his own fate. He died, aged twenty-eight, a few months after the film’s premiere.

Ivica Matić’s body of work is regarded as one of the pillars of Bosnian-Herzegovinian cinema. Five decades after its creation, thanks to the Slovenian Cinematheque and a project by the Association of European Cinematheques, a restored copy of Woman with a Landscape is now available to audiences.

Amir Muratović