ifs-Begegnung: Edimotion mit »Der Filmamateur«

ON THE BIG SCREEN

“The Amateur Filmmaker”

Feature film, POL 1979, Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski, Editor: Halina Nawrocka, 117 min, Original version with subtitles

Followed by a discussion with film editor Andrew Bird, moderated by Dietmar Kraus (curator at the Edimotion Film Festival)

Filip, a factory worker and new father, buys an 8-mm camera to capture the first moments of his daughter’s life. His new hobby is warmly received at work, and he is commissioned to document the factory’s 20th anniversary. But his growing enthusiasm for the possibilities of filmmaking puts a strain on his marriage to Irka. And his superiors don’t agree with all the ideas he wants to implement either.

“The Amateur Filmmaker” is a satire by Krzysztof Kieślowski, laced with humor and bearing strong autobiographical elements. With subtle irony, the film depicts the bleakness of everyday life under socialism in Poland at the time, the restrictions imposed by censorship and self-censorship, and filmmaking as a vital—yet potentially self-destructive—obsession. The film is part of the so-called “cinema of moral unease,” which emerged in Poland between 1976 and 1981. Among its most important directors, alongside Kieślowski, are Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Agnieszka Holland.

With *The Amateur*, Kieślowski achieved his international breakthrough: he received the Grand Prix at the Moscow International Film Festival and the Otto Dibelius Prize at the Berlinale. Our guest, editor Andrew Bird, selected this film for this ifs event because it inspired him to try his hand at filmmaking: “Shortly after seeing it in the theater, I bought my first Super 8 camera and came to love making films just as much as experiencing them in the theater.”

Andrew Bird was born in Hillingdon, England. After studying German language and literature, he came to Hamburg on a scholarship and has lived there ever since. He worked as a translator and interpreter and has been a film editor since 1992. In the mid-1990s, he met the young Fatih Akin. He helped him edit his first short films—the beginning of a collaboration that continues to this day; Andrew Bird is responsible for editing all of Akin’s directorial works. For his editing work on *Head-On* (2004), he won the Filmstiftung NRW Feature Film Editing Award at Edimotion for the first time. For “The Edge of Heaven” (2007), he was awarded the German Film Critics’ Prize, the German Film Award, and his second Edimotion Editing Prize. In 2025, he won his third Edimotion prize for “The Seed of the Holy Fig Tree.” Andrew Bird has been a member of the board of the German Film Academy since 2023. He is also a member of the European Film Academy and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In the series “ifs Encounter: Edimotion,” we ask editors about their personal favorite films, whose outstanding editing they would like to highlight.

An event presented by Edimotion—Festival for Film Editing and the Art of Montage—in cooperation with the ifs International Film School Cologne, as part of Filmforum NRW e. V. With the kind support of the City of Cologne’s Cultural Affairs Office.