Paweł Borowski was born in 1973 in Warsaw. He graduated with honours from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts departments of painting and animation. As a painter, he had a number of individual exhibitions at the Centre For Contemporary Art in Warsaw and the Zachęta Gallery (e.g. Buy or Die. Supermarket, World To Cancel). As a performer, he was the creator of The Great Promotion of Love and The Great Promotion of Friendship campaigns, which encouraged people to seek real values in life by means of billboard posters. He made three animated films. Kocham cię / I Love You was screened at Silver Screen cinemas before feature films for adults. Boro has a regular weekly column in the biggest Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, where he publishes his film reviews in the form of drawings.
He made two animated films: Love Gamestation (2001), awarded at the Kraków festival OFAFA, and an experimental film I Love You (2003), a protest against the objectification of woman. As one of the few Polish short films it was screened in big cinema theatres (Silver Screen Cinemas) before full-length films. Under the pseudonym of Boro he publishes regularly comic strip film reviews in Gazeta Wyborcza.
In 2009, he made his full - lengh feature directorial debut with Zero. The film shows a mosaic of twenty-four short stories revolving around ethical dilemmas of residents of large cities. It was well received by the critics, and the director was nominated for the Eagles Polish Film Award in the category the Discovery of the Year.
From 2008 Paweł Borowski has been cooperating with Platige. As part of this engagement he has prepared more than sixty short movies, both advertisement clips (for such companies as for example HEYAH, DANONE or ŻYWIEC), and accompanying social campaigns. His spots for ORANGE are easily recognizable for their sense of humour and their upbeat character. He tells the stories of orange monsters both with charm and a sense of drama. Similar lightness can be seen in his short movie for the Polish Film Institute, where some of the leading Polish actors are set in a dynamically shown sequence, showing vitality and diversity of the Polish cinema.
Ten years passed until Borowski had a chance to make a comeback to the silver screen. As he said in an interview for Culture.pl, in the meantime he worked on various projects, including a film adaptation of Karol Kalinowski's comics Łauna, which never came to fruition. In 2016, the director started shooting I Am Lying Now – after three years of postproduction, the picture was released in 2019.
In the film, three celebrities (portrayed by Maja Ostaszewska, Paulina Walendziak and Rafał Maćkowiak) take part in a TV show called Confessional for the Stars. As the plot unfolds, Borowski problematises the concepts of truth and fiction, examining how human beings need to construct narratives to understand (or perhaps obfuscate) what is happening around them. The film is set in 2008 – however, it's not the 2008 we have known and lived, but 2008 as envisioned in the futuristic fantasies of the 1960s. To complicate things further, the events that occur in the TV studio are subsequently shown from the perspective of all three contestants. Most critics were not particularly enthusiastic about I Am Lying Now – however, some (including Dwutygodnik's Jakub Socha and Filmweb's Łukasz Muszyński) noted how Borowski completely diverted from the beaten tracks of Polish cinema.
Filmography:
- 2001 - Love Gamestation (Silver Line at the OFAFA Animated Film Festival in Kraków)
- 2002 - Oh, Poland
- 2003 - Kocham cię / I Love You
- 2009 - Zero - First Award at the Filmfest DC, special Award at the Tarnów Film Festival, the Złoty Dzik Awrd at Świdnica Film Directors Festival, Animul Trophy at the ANONIMUL International Independent Film Festival, the Jury Award at the CinePécs International Film Festival, The Złote Grono Awrad at the Lubuskie Lato Filmowe, the Leonardo's Horse Award for direction at the Mediolan International Film Festival Awards
- 2019 - I Am Lying Now
Source: from the catalogue Young Polish Cinema published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute June 2007, updated April 2020, NS.
