The rootless director and his extreme characters

Lech Kowalski is a rootless man.

In the press conference of Lech Kowalski, we meet a tired but talkative man.

"I find ordinary people totally uninteresting”, Kowalski says.

He says that he feels most comfortable in the company of people who, in a way or another, are living outside the traditional society. But according to him, he has never needed to look for themes for his films; they are a part of his personality.

”I am rootless myself, a Polish immigrant in America. I feel connected to the people I depict”, Kowalski says.

The Wild Wild East Trilogy Is Getting Ready

Kowalski’s documentary trilogy representing Poland is getting cmpleted little by little. The first episode of the trilogy (Boot Factory, 2000) is about Krakovian punks, who made their living by making shoes. In On Hitler’s Highway (2002), Kowalski travels along the Nazi built highway and encounters different kinds of people, from a prostitute to an old gypsy.

The third episode was supposed to depict prostitutes in Warsaw. However, the theme has changed.

”The third episode is a film about my mother; a film about Poland, shot in America. The idea of making a film on an eastern European prostitute seemed so cliché that I just didn’t want to do it. 

Kowalski is not going to abandon the prostitution theme, however, but he’s going for a totally new approach.

”I’m working on a documentary about an American man, who’s unsatisfied with his life. He participates in sexual escapades with strange men and women without telling his wife. He films these sessions himself and I edit them. The working title is A Diary of a Husband”, the director explains enthusiastically.

”People are sick of the bullshit”

 At the Tampere Film Festival, Kowalski’s film screenings have been nearly sold out. According to the director, the time is right for candid and unconventional documentaries.

”Although this too is a cliché, people are sick and tired of the bullshit. Theatres, TV-stations and distribution channels are owned by big studios. If you make unconventional documentaries, the only way to succeed is to go round film festivals and try to sell your films there”, Kowalski says.

Little by little, Kowalski’s work is starting to pay off financially. According to the director, he gets a yearly $15 000-20 000 profit from his D.O.A. documentary (1981). However, it is still difficult to receive financing for documentary films.

”When I was offering the Wild Wild East trilogy about Poland to a producer in New York, he blurted out: Where the hell is Poland? He was joking, of course, but what he meant was that it wouldn’t be easy to get the American audience interested in the theme.

Kowalski lives partly in France, and appreciates the subsidies filmmakers receive there.

”I wouldn’t be at this festival if it wasn’t for ARTE. The prevailing culture in France supports different people and films. My productions are dependent on the financial support from the state”, Kowalski says.

Yet he’s not planning to film documentaries dealing with the French society.

”I make documentaries in France and with their financial support, but it’s hard for me to find interesting topics in that country. France is such a bourgeois society, where most filmmakers come from middle-class backgrounds. I’m not interested in any of that”, he says.