I’ve just heard, courtesy of John Riley’s new (and excellent) COUNTERpoint blog, that although Andrzej Wajda is too ill to attend the Censorship as a Creative Force panel discussion at London’s Barbican Arts Centre on Friday next week, he’ll be recording a ten-minute video address for it.
His physical place will be taken by Agnieszka Holland, whose credentials are pretty much impeccable – and because she’s worked extensively in the West (France and the US, most recently directing episodes of the outstanding US drana series The Wire), she’s had wider experience of various different film-production systems (communist Polish, subsidised French, capitalist US) than has Wajda. Also, she speaks English, which presumably gives the Barbican less of a translation headache (I have to confess that I’m slightly dreading this aspect of the discussion – the translation during the recent London screening of Miklós Jancsó’s The Round-Up was so fast and seamless that it set a standard that’s going to be very hard to live up to).
I still don’t know who – if anyone – is replacing Wajda at Tuesday’s British premiere of Katyń, but I understand the Polish Cultural Institute is working on it.