The Sokołowsko archive contains a collection of about forty unrealized film projects by Krzysztof Kieślowski. Most of them are scripts or sketches of ideas for short films – etudes from his time at the Łódź Film School and documentaries from his time at the Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw. Some of them have become legendary, such as the documentary film project Photo of the Week, about political trials in Poland after the introduction of martial law in December 1981. Kieślowski wanted to film the faces of the condemned at the moment when the defendants heard the words of the often very harsh sentence. However, every time he turned on the camera, the judge would reduce the sentence. Years later, Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi described the story of the unfinished production of Photo of the Week in his short story Festival. To see how the literary vision compares to the original idea, just take a look at the script in the ATTK collection.
Another of Kieślowski’s projects was finally realized years later thanks to the efforts of the In Situ Foundation. The future director of The Scar wrote the script for the animated film The Deer while studying at the Film School in Łódź. The Deer is a film about ecology. Concerned about the destruction of nature, the deer goes to the authorities to complain about an industrial plant polluting the river. The irritated official, before throwing the visitor out the door, persuades the deer that the factory’s activities are a great success that cannot be criticized. Since 2025, Japanese artist Izumi Yoshida has been producing an animated film based on this script at the Wrocław Film Studio.
The archive in Sokołowsko hides more similar treasures. There is a script for another animated short film that has not yet been made, The Doll, as well as drafts for short feature films: Almost Together, The Funeral, The Queue, The First Time, The Event, and an adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz’s short story The Feast at Countess Kotłubaj’s. A separate collection consists of scripts for documentary films, both those that were made and those that were never realized. They are a trace of their author’s diverse artistic explorations.
The famous “Połaniec crime,” which took place on Christmas Eve in 1976, later became the subject of books and films. Perhaps Kieślowski and Hanna Krall were the first to take up this topic (when the investigation was coming to an end), writing a script for a documentary that was never made. The last sentences of this text bring to mind the later A Short Film About Killing: “It would be a film […] and ultimately about how terribly complicated human beings are, how each of us is divided between good and evil.”