The award’s patron Luchino Visconti was a famous Italian filmmaker and stage director, whose credits included masterpieces such as The Leopard, Rocco and His Brothers and Death in Venice.
Tony Renis, honorary president of the Ischia Global Film & Music Festival, praised Skolimowski, saying: “It is an honour to celebrate an innovator of the seventh art in Eastern Europe, award-winning author from Berlin to Cannes, Venice (which also awarded him the Golden Lion) thanks to works such as Moonlighting, Essential Killing, until the last success, again in Cannes.”
Renis referred to Skolimowski’s latest feature Eo, which received the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Festival.
In his thank-you remarks on Ischia, Skolimowski confessed that he had expected a more prestigious award at Cannes. “Many people described Eo as the most interesting film. Anyway, I’m very happy. None of my previous films proved a bigger commercial success. I’m very busy now with the promotion of Eo”, he said.
Skolimowski, who is now 84, graduated from the Faculty of Ethnography at Warsaw University at the age of 21, before enrolling at the Łódź Film School. He co-authored the script to Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers, and to the highly-acclaimed debut feature by Roman Polański, Knife in the Water (together with Polański).
His early films – Identification Mark, Barrier, Walkover and Hands Up – represented the so-called ‘new wave’ in Polish cinema.
The 1967 feature Hands Up was banned by the communist censors and did not go on general release until the Solidarity revolution in 1981. The controversy surrounding the film was one of the reasons behind Skolimowski’s decision to emigrate.
Since 1970, he has worked in Italy, France, Britain and the United States, where he lived for many years. He currently lives in Poland.
In 2008, Skolimowski made his comeback to filmmaking after a lapse of seventeen years with the highly-acclaimed Four Nights with Anna, followed by the political thriller Essential Killing, which received the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Festival in 2010.
(mk/pm)