She’d always wanted to be an actress, however blind luck pushed her towards direction instead. She attended a movie class in I LO in Wrocław and it is there that she got really into films. In an interview with Barbara Lekarczyk-Cisek, she says:
It was a huge step forward for me, I saw numerous movies by Antonini, Fellini, Visconti and many more that I’d not heard of before.
By the time she finished high school, she had already known that she wanted to be a film or theatre director. However, before she passed Film School exams, she had studied Art History and Cultural Studies, as well as assisted Mikołaj Grabowski in his play King Lear in Łódź.
She studied at Direction Department at Silesian university in Katowice. At first she aimed at documentary films, however she quickly abandoned that idea, as telling real, tragic stories was too much for her. In Pieniążki [trans. Money] she weaved a story about poor children, working to support their families. In another movie, Article 567 from 2005 she told a story of Sławomir Sikora, a man whose life became an inspiration for the movie The Debt directed by Krzysztof Krauze. In 2010 she created another documentary, this time about the life of a singer Maria Fołtyn.
After having finished studying in Katowice, Smoczńska decided to enrol to Wajda School. In another part with the aforementioned interview she said:
I was really keen on meeting my masters: Edward Żebrowski, Wojciech Marczewski, Marcel Łoziński and more...
In the school she made a 30-minute movie Aria Diva, based on a short story Ariadna na Naksos [trans. Ariadne on Naxos] by Olga Tokarczuk. There, she tells a story of Basia, a woman in her thirties who sacrifices her professional life to be full-time mother and wife. When a new neighbour, an opera diva, moves in next door, the two women develop extraordinary relationship which makes Basia revaluate her life. The movie received awards at festivals in Batumi, Ismail, Wrocław, Gdynia, Kraków and New York.
Aria Diva was the second time Smoczyńska worked with Robert Bolesto, one of the most talented screenwriters of his generation in Poland. Their first meeting was on the set of 3 love, a short feature about a girl murdered by a man with whom she’d gone on a date.
