Anecdotes

His top ten films include (in alphabetical order): Popiól i diament (1958), Lásky jedné plavovlásky (1965), Cul-de-sac (1966), Les moissons du ciel (1978), La dolce vita (1960), Sjecas li se, Dolly Bell (1981), Le miroir (1975), Vol au-dessus d'un nid de coucou (1975), Certains l'aiment chaud (1959), Taxi Driver (1976).

His wife was a Russian immigrant pianist who was diagnosed with severe cancer in 2006 while he was busy working on "The Restraint of Beasts". When Pawel learned about his wife's terminal illness, he abandoned the project and stayed with her until she died. He quit directing for 5 years to take care of their children until their graduation.

His Ida (2013) was the first Polish movie to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

His paternal grandmother was Polish-Jewish and died in Auschwitz. Pawel learned about it from his father as a grown-up. This must have been a shocking news for him as he had been baptised and raised Catholic by his deeply religious mother.

While studying at Oxford University, he met his professor's wife Halina Wolinska-Brus. He thought she was a very kind funny old lady. As it turned out though, that Polish immigrant had been after the war a brutal Stalinist prosecutor, who had been sentencing many innocent people with death penalty. Wolinska-Brus was later used by Pawlikowski as a prototype for the character of Bloody Wanda in his movie "Ida".

His mother was Catholic and worked as an English teacher at the University of Warsaw. His father worked as a doctor and was a Polish-Jewish atheist and patriot who taught him respect for Polish history. Soon after the parents split up, his father was forced to leave his beloved Poland due to antisemitic cleansing of 1968. At first, he went to Austria, and then moved to Germany where he would later reunite with Pawel's mother. Meanwhile, in 1971 Pawel moved with his mother abroad. He lived briefly in Germany, Italy and France. However, he's spent most of his life (nearly 30 years) in England.

In 2004 became Creative Arts Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, following a major grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board. Pawlikowski will spend three years at the University, undertaking research into the realist genres of contemporary film-making in Britain, and interacting with staff and students on the University's new degree in Film Studies.

Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival in 2015. The jury chose Desde Allá (2015) as the winner of the Golden Lion.

Chairman of the 'Official Competition' jury at the Reykjavik International Film Festival in 2005. The jury chose Moartea domnului Lazarescu (2005) as the winner.

Nominated for a 2019 Academy Award in the Best Director category for his work on La guerre froide (2018) but lost to Alfonso Cuarón for Roma (2018).

Head of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 59th BFI London Film Festival in 2015.

President of the jury at the Pula Film Festival in 2021.

Made a series of prize winning documentries at the BBC including some Serbian epics, in 1992.

Born in Poland he moved to London at 15 then studied poetry at Oxford.

In the 1980s, he was a frequent contributor to the relatively short-lived but much-admired British film magazine, "Stills".