Lech Majewski: Landscape of Dreams

A poet, painter, composer, video artist and filmmaker, Lech Majewski was born in Katowice, Poland and graduated from the influential Lodz Film School. Majewski emigrated abroad and fashioned a career in a broad variety of disciplines, writing books, creating a series of video art installations, directing theatre productions and operas in addition to making films. Majewski will be resident in Christchurch for five weeks in March/April 2009, giving classes, public lectures, and attending our screening of Garden of Earthly Delights on 23 March.

“A brilliant filmmaker whose haunting aesthetic is formed of much deeper stuff, processed through a lively mind and idiosyncratic imagination, chastened and tempered by history, and captured on screen with the rigour and perfectionism of an artist who might also carve castles out of toothpicks.” – Philip Kennicott, Washington Post

“Whether based on legends or true events, grounded in both surrealist dreams and the inescapable atrocities of Central European reality, Majewski’s films merge cinema, prose, music, and art, sampling from the cinematic visions of Federico Fellini… the surrealist writings of Bruno Schulz, the stately arrangements of composers Henryk Gorecki and Philip Glass, and art movements as disparate as the Silesian mystics and Matthew Barney.” – Jason Sanders, Pacific Film Archive

Funding for this season of films was given by: