Before he enrolled at film school, he tried his hand at many other professions. He worked as a carpenter at the WFDiF (Documentaries and Feature Films Production Company in Warsaw), as a warehouseman at a grocery store and as a fence painter. He also tried studying IT and physics. In 1988, he was accepted at the National Film School in Łódź and graduated in 1992, making a full-length documentary, Birth Place. His only feature film, Kratka (Gutter), came out in 1996.
Łoziński has collaborated with his father, the celebrated documentary director Marcel Łoziński, on several films, including the 1993 short documentary film 89 mm from Europe and Anything Can Happen, the 1995 short that is one of the most popular Polish documentary films of all time.
Paweł Łoziński's way of showing the world is akin to his father’s works, especially when it comes to his relationship with the characters. His second huge influence comes from the legacy of Krzysztof Kieślowski, which can be seen in Łoziński’s seriousness in taking on difficult subjects and the respect he has towards the characters. It is also a source of his attempts to deal with the most controversial, socially or historically important matters.
Non-action cinema
Birth Place took on one of matters of that kind. It presents the issue of the memories of the strained Polish-Jewish relationship of the Nazi occupation period. It is a shocking documentary, where the main character finds the corpse of his father and finds out that one of his Polish neighbours was the murderer.
Other films directed by Łoziński which touched upon the most difficult issues of the war and post-war periods include Mój spis z natury we wsi Leźno Małe, a short documentary about poverty in the Polish countryside after the political transformation of 1989, and Między Drzwiami (Between the Doors), part of the international series Across the Border, a film about Poles who were expelled from the Eastern borderlands after World War II and forced to move to the lands from which the Germans had themselves been expelled.
Yet, he is mostly renowned for creating simple, intimate films, documenting ordinary peoples' stories, in which the smallest problems of his protagonists are shown against the background of more general social issues. Two films of this kind are Taka historia (A Just So Story) and The Sisters. They were both made by Paweł Łoziński on his own, using only a compact digital camera ensuring intimacy and not requiring any additional crew who could interfere with his relationship with the portrayed people. As the director said:
What I am interested in is 'those little issues', trivial, seemingly negligible things. It turns out that they can become the substance of life. In the movie that I am currently working on, there is not much action, but this lack of action appears to be the most interesting to me. I think that what may seem boring at the first glance is in fact the most fascinating, once you start to investigate it.
This approach may be a sign of an impact of the so-called 'Karabasz School', a way of making documentaries, which was established by Kazimierz Karabasz, the godfather of all Polish documentary film-makers. His ideas can be easily found in Łoziński words:
I am interested in observing normal life. By a 'documentary', I understand an original way of looking at the world, at true stories, presented in such a way that they mean slightly more than they initially seem to (…) I think that a terse documentary, going deep into the subject, will mean much more to the audience than a flashy action film, which tends to work like a colourful fan: you open it, than you close it and it is no longer interesting, its over.