Outstanding film director and great friend of Ukraine Krzysztof Zanussi turned 86 today

Krzysztof Zanussi is one of the last living (and may he live long) classics of 20th century cinema, a great friend of Ukraine, who condemned Russian aggression back in 2014 after the illegal annexation of Crimea, and in 2022, after a full-scale armed invasion of Russia, presented his home to Ukrainian refugees.

For more than half a century, he has been making films about the meaning of life and religion, changes in the spiritual mood of society and the role of the intelligentsia in this process. As we wrote several years ago, anticipating our big, pre-war. interviews with him, in his films "Spiral", "Crystal Structure", "Illumination" (illumination is a medieval church name for spiritual illumination), "Protective Colors", "Ether", Zanussi, like a surgeon (although he is a physicist by his first education), opens the body of society and man with a sharp scalpel to find a disease hidden there and invisible to the naked eye.

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All this is all the more interesting because Zanussi is not just a legendary film director, but also an outstanding European intellectual, who is a unique phenomenon among filmmakers, even the most talented ones. One can even say that if you want to learn about some complex phenomenon the correct and at the same time briefly and clearly formulated opinion - ask Zanussi.

It is extremely difficult to ask him about this, since he travels all over the world all year round. And yet, referring to our many years of correspondence and face-to-face (we met the master several times and literally over the course of decades) acquaintance with the director, we managed to achieve our goal.

The interview turned out to be long, very interesting (like everything that Zanussi does) and, one must assume, unexpected even for him, since we asked him about things that no one had asked him about before. For example, Zanussi’s confession, a physicist by his first education, that he believes in heaven, hell and the salvation of the soul is worth a lot. However, there were also more traditional questions - about the European Union, the place of the intelligentsia in the modern world and, of course, cinema.

There is no point in retelling all this, so you can read the interview here, and we wish the maestro health and new works in cinema and theater.

Photo: Krzysztof Zanussi in an interview with Lenta.UA