Jerzy Skolimowski

Jerzy Skolimowski made this film at seventy-seven and called it his answer to Hollywood action cinema: eleven minutes in the lives of a dozen or so people over one afternoon in Warsaw, cut together into a thriller. A mosaic with one dead pixel. — Late one afternoon in Warsaw, a courier delivers a package he’d rather not think about, a hot-dog seller keeps quiet about his past and a climber abseils down from a hotel roof. In a suite upstairs, a Hollywood director is holding a screen test with an actress whose husband is waiting for her in the lobby. They have eleven minutes left. — Vittorio Veneto Award - Special Mention | Venice Film Festival | 2015 Best European Sound Designer | European Film Awards | 2016 Best Editing | Eagles - Polish Film Awards | 2016 Special Jury Prize | Polish Film Festival | 2015 Best Score | Polish Film Festival | 2015 Best Editing | Polish Film Festival | 2015

Skolimowski began the script in December 1981, and by May 1982 it had won him a prize at Cannes. Jeremy Irons plays Nowak, the only one in a crew of Polish builders who speaks English, earning extra money in London when martial law is declared back home and the borders close. — In December 1981, four Polish workers arrive in London to renovate their boss’s flat on the cheap. Only Nowak, the foreman, knows any English, so he does all the shopping, haggling and minding of the money. When martial law is declared at home and the borders close, Nowak is the first to find out, and he doesn’t say a word to the others. — Best Screenplay | Cannes Film Festival | 1982

When a drifter claims he can kill with a shout, it’s unsettling news for a composer who makes his living recording sound. Skolimowski built the scream from forty different sounds, including a rocket taking off, and the film, part horror and part surreal dream, won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. — Anthony Fielding spends his days recording sounds and cutting them together in the Devon house he shares with his wife, Rachel. One day a stranger called Crossley appears at their door. He soon lets them know that he learned to kill with a shout while he was in Australia. — Grand Prize of the Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 1978