Jolanta Dylewska Dylewska's latest film, In Darkness, directed by Agnieszka Holland, has been nominated for the foreign-film Academy Award in 2012. It has already won the top prize at November's Plus Camerimage film festival in Łódź, fighting off fierce competition from other productions such as The Tree of Life and Melancholia.
In Darkness is not the 53-year-old's first film. Dylewska graduated from the National Film School in Łódź in 1989, and worked on several international productions including Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan. She had originally wanted to become a director, but, as she told Variety, "fell in love with the camera". Dylewska states that her early foray into documentary filmmaking thought her to look at the world attentively, and always ask herself before each film the question of who is the camera in the story.
As the director of photography on In Darkness, a WWII tale of Jews hiding from the Nazis in the sewers under Lviv, she managed to realistically recreate the darkness of the sewers.
Variety quotes Dylewska on her experience working on the film with Holland,
The challenge, artistically and technologically, was to deliver the real darkness of the sewers (...) Agnieszka [Holland] would always shout, "Darker, darker!" She was much more courageous than me in entering the darkness. I was following her, building shadows so the gestures and the glances of the actors would not disappear, and so the audience would feel touched by this darkness.
Other top-ten world cinematographers named by Iain Blair on Variety's "to watch" list are: Christopher Blauvelt (Nobody Walks), Manuel Alberto Claro (Melancholia), Benjamin Kasulke (The Off Hours; Safety Not Guaranteed; Your Sister's Sister) and Masanobu Takayanagi (Warrior; The Grey).
See Variety's article on Dylewska
Variety is one of the most influential weekly entertainment magazines published in the US. It was established in New York in 1905.
In Darkness Trailer