The movie last month won Pawlikowski the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival in France in what was one of the greatest successes for Polish cinema in decades.
The Polish-French-British co-production is a love story between two people of different backgrounds and temperaments, set against the backdrop of the Cold War in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The film takes place in Poland, the former Yugoslavia, Berlin and Paris.
In an interview with Catholic weekly Gość Niedzielny published on Thursday, Poland's Deputy Prime Minister and Culture Minister Piotr Gliński described Cold War as "a very good film, with excellent acting, music and directing."
Gliński said: "It is a film about a difficult love, a love that was both toxic and beautiful. It tells about people who can’t live without each other and who at the same time can hardly bear each other. There were many such dramatic stories after World War II."
Pawlikowski’s Cold War has won rave reviews from foreign critics.
Peter Bradshaw has described it in The Guardian as a "mysterious, musically glorious and visually ravishing film ... an elliptical, episodic story of imprisonment and escape, epic in scope."
Geoffrey Macnab has written in The Independent that Cold War is "a glorious throwback – a film made with a verve and lyricism which rekindles memories of the glory days of European New Wave cinema."
Leslie Felperin, a critic for The Hollywood Reporter, has called Cold War "a thrilling exploration of romantic disappointment with a killer soundtrack."
Piotr Dzięcioł, head of Opus Film, a co-producer of Cold War, has said that the film has been invited to many festivals, from Singapore to Toronto. The film will be shown in many countries, including the United States and Canada where the distribution is in the hands of Amazon.
Born in Warsaw in 1957, Pawlikowski left Poland with his family at the age of 14. He first lived in Germany and Italy before moving to Britain. He studied literature and philosophy. In the mid-1980s he took up filmmaking, initially focusing on documentaries and then moving on to docudrama and feature films. He now resides in Warsaw.
Pawlikowski’s credits include Last Resort, My Summer of Love and Ida, which has won an Oscar and a BAFTA for best foreign-language film as well as three European Film Awards.
(mk/gs)