Born in 1957 in Warsaw, Paweł Pawlikowski left Poland at the age of 14 to live in Germany and then in Italy, before settling in Britain in 1977. He studied literature and philosophy before turning to film-making in the mid-1980s. His early films were documentaries produced by the BBC. He made his feature-length fiction film debut in 1997 with The Stringer. It was with My Summer of Love, which won the BAFTA for Best British Film, that he gained international recognition in 2005. Seven years later, he set his camera in France to adapt Douglas Kennedy’s La Femme du 5e. With his feature film Ida, he returned to Poland and won, amongst other honours, the FIPRESCI Prize for International Critics at the Toronto Film Festival in 2013, as well as the Grand Prix at the Warsaw, London, Minsk and Gijón film festivals. In 2018 and 2026, his films Cold War and Fatherland (released in France on 2 December) won the Best Director Award at Cannes.