Wojciech Wiszniewski

Wojciech Wiszniewski was a son of a lawyer Wlodzimierz Wiszniewski, who died when the boy was only five. In order to make ends meet his mother Irena Czajkowska decided to rent rooms in their apartment to the students of the Film School in Lódz. Thanks to that her two sons got acquainted with a lot of future renowned film directors, such as Roman Polanski, Andrzej Kostenko, Stefan Schabenbeck or Henryk Kluba. The two brothers got so fascinated with cinema and carefree lives of film-makers that they decided to make their living in the same way. And they both succeeded in it. Wojciech became a director, while his elder brother Wlodzimierz Wiszniewski started his acting career. Between 1965 and 1969 Wojciech Wiszniewski was a student at the world-famous PWSFTviT (Polish National Academy of Film, Theatre and TV in Lódz). The first two years he spent in the Department of Cinematography and then moved to the Department of Directing due to various health problems (bad eyesight, heart failures). Wiszniewski was one of the school's best and most promising students. His fellow students on the same year included Marcel Lozinski, Tomasz Zygadlo and Maciej Wojtyszko. He managed to make merely 12 films (6 student shorts, 5 documentary short subjects and 1 TV feature) before his premature death of heart attack at the age of 34. In spite of this Wiszniewski has been considered one of the most outstanding personalities of his generation and without a doubt a classic of Polish documentary cinema. Although his shorts made him a master of innovative documentary film-making, most of them were shelved by the government censors, who also disabled him to eventually make his own feature debut. The last years of his life he spent fighting for making an adaptation of the novel "Królobójcy" ('King Slayers') by Jerzy Lojek about the kidnapping of King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski by the Bar Confederates. Wiszniewski died suddenly a few days before the shooting was scheduled to begin. He is survived by his wife, painter Joanna Milobedzka-Wiszniewska, and their son Mateusz.