Andrzej ŻUŁAWSKI

Director, screenwriter, novelist, essayist and actor born in 1940 in Lviv (now Ukraine), died in 2016 in Warsaw.
A non-conformist visionary of world cinema, his approach to storytelling is idiosyncratic and characterised by explosions of violence, sexuality, and despair. The actors in his movies have played out the most intensely high-pitched emotions in cinema history which inspired the French to coin the term 'Żuławskien', meaning 'over the top'. In an interview with Margaret Barton-Fumo, Żuławski describes his films as provoking a certain kind of awareness, nervousness, open-eyed-ness. Although remaining unclassifiable, the vision of the world portrayed in his films has been described as tragic, shocking and hysterical, Żuławski himself retorts, "I do not make films in order to shock through form. I do not want to s...