National Film School in Łódź

Krzysztof Kieślowski ; 27 June 1941 – 13 March 1996 was an influential Polish film director and screenwriter known internationally for The... Decalogue , The Double Life of Véronique , and The Three Colors Trilogy . Kieślowski was born in Warsaw and grew up in several small towns, moving wherever his engineer father, a tuberculosis patient, could find treatment. At sixteen, he briefly 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 decided to become a theatre director, but at the time you had to already have at least a bachelor to apply for the theatre school, so he chose to study film as an intermediate step. He was raised Roman Catholic and retained what he called a "personal and private" relationship with God. Leaving college and working as a theatrical tailor, Kieślowski applied to the Łódź Film School, the famed Polish film school which also has Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda among its alumni. He was rejected twice.
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Andrzej Wajda is a Polish film director. Recipient of an honorary Oscar, he is possibly the most prominent member of the unofficial "Polish Film... School" . He is known especially for a trilogy of war films: A Generation , Kanał and Ashes and Diamonds . Four of his films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: The Promised Land , The Maids of Wilko , Man of Iron , and Katyń . After Wajda's apprenticeship to director Aleksander Ford, Wajda was given the opportunity to direct his own film. With A Generation , the first-time director poured out his disillusionment over jingoism, using as his alter ego a young, James Dean-style antihero played by Zbigniew Cybulski, 22-year-old Roman Polanski also featured. At the same time Andrzej Wajda began his work as a director in theatre, including such as Michael V. Gazzo's Hatful of Rain , Hamlet , and Two for the Seesaw by William Gibson.
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Roman Polanski is a French-Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is... considered one of the few "truly international filmmakers." Polanski's films have inspired diverse directors, including the Coen Brothers, Atom Egoyan, Darren Aronofsky, Park Chan-wook, Abel Ferrara, and Wes Craven. Born in Paris to Polish parents, he moved with his family back to Poland in 1937, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Holocaust and was educated in Poland and became a director of both art house and commercial films. Polanski's first feature-length film, Knife in the Water , made in Poland, was nominated for a United States Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film but was beaten by Federico Fellini's 8½. He has since received five more Oscar nominations, along with two Baftas, four Césars, a Golden Globe Award and the Palme d'Or of the Cannes Film Festival in France. In the United Kingdom he directed three films, beginning with Repulsion . In 1968 he moved to the United States, and cemented his status by directing the Oscar-winning horror film Rosemary's Baby .
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