After the Oscars
After such an amazing debut, Żal had to decide on his next step: he chose the collaboration with talented, young directors. Magnus von Horn's The Here After (2015), shown in Cannes and awarded for Best Direction and Best Screenplay in Gdynia, turned out to be a great success. The Polish-Swedish production about a young boy who has to face his own crime and the ostracism of his peers was widely acclaimed. Żal's cinematography perfectly conveyed the chilly atmosphere and were like a look from the distance, so characteristic of Scandinavian cinema. Żal was also responsible for cinematography in Wojciech Kasperski's The High Frontier (2016), a thriller set in Bieszczady. He collaborated with the director also on Icon (2016) - a story about a psychiatric institution in the Siberian province. The film was awarded with Złoty Lajkonik award and FIPRESCI award at the Cracow Film Festival, where Żal was also honoured for best cinematography.
Loving Vincent – Filming Animation
One of the most unusual cinematography experiences in Żal’s career was his next film – Loving Vincent, a feature-length animation using real paintings. 65,000 paintings were used for this 95-minute-long story, inspired by tens of Vincent van Gogh’s more and less known paintings. From among 5,000 entries, 125 artists were chosen, who, frame by frame, painted the story of the Dutch artist, using more than 3,000 litres of paint.
However, before they started work on the paintings, Łukasz Żal, together with the directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, and the second cinematographer Tristan Oliver, had to capture every shot with real actors and a stanard camera. Only after being filmed, the material became a canvas for the animated film, which ended up being nominated for an Academy Award.
Dovlatov – a Dream of a Spiritual Journey
In 2018, another exceptional film with Żal’s cinematography came on to the big screen: Dovlatov, directed by Aleksei German Jr., a Russian director who has worked on a number of Polish-Russian co-productions. The story depicts several days from the life of the prominent Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov who was sentenced to artistic non-existence by the authorities in the 1970s. Łukasz Maciejewski wrote the following in his review of the film written for the Onet website:
The oneiric ‘Dovlatov’ is a film in the spirit of Angelopoulos, a film about awaiting one’s fate, the never-ending journey and the problem of nature versus culture […]. Łukasz Żal’s cinematography looks as if it was taken straight out of ‘Ulysses’ Gaze’ or ‘Eternity and a Day’ – the Greek director’s later masterpieces. In his films, Theo Angelopoulous invoked the salvaged rudiments of a great cultural legacy. He emphasised that a self-conscious filmmaker cannot limit himself, be ashamed of grandiose words, scenes and of pathos. What irritates in others, comes out as a lesson of cinegenic beauty in the works of Angelopoulos or his student, German.
Cold War – Love Poetry
