Cinema of Poland

Cinema of Poland
Film festival Off Plus Camera in Kraków, 2012
Number of screens	1,122 (2011)
• Per capita	3.2 per 100,000 (2011)
Main distributors	United International Pictures 26.8% Forum Film 12.8% Imperial Cinepix 11.9%
Produced feature films (2011)
Fictional	32 (62.7%)
Animated	1 (2.0%)
Documentary	18 (35.3%)
Number of admissions (2011)
Total	39,663,222
• Per capita	1 (2012)
National films	11,624,566 (29.3%)
Gross box office (2010)
Total	PLN 703 million
National films	PLN 43.5 million (6.2%)

The history of cinema in Poland is almost as long as history of cinematography, and it has universal achievements, even though Polish movies tend to be less commercially available than movies from several other European nations.

After World War II, the communist government built an auteur based national cinema, trained hundreds of new directors and empowered them to make films. Filmmakers like Roman Polanski, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Agnieszka Holland, Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Żuławski, Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Skolimowski impacted the development of the cinematography. In more recent years, the industry has been producer-led with finance being the key to a film being made, and with a large number of independent filmmakers of all genres, Polish productions tend to be more inspired by American film.

The first cinema in Poland (then occupied by the Russian Empire) was founded in Łódź in 1899, several years after the invention of the Cinematograph. Initially dubbed Living Pictures Theatre, it gained much popularity and by the end of the next decade there were cinemas in almost every major town of Poland. Arguably the first Polish filmmaker was Kazimierz Prószyński, who filmed various short documentaries in Warsaw. His pleograph film camera had been patented before the Lumière brothers' invention and he is credited as the author of the earliest surviving Polish documentary titled Ślizgawka w Łazienkach (Skating-rink in the Royal Baths), as well as the first short narrative films Powrót birbanta (Rake's return home) and Przygoda dorożkarza (Cabman's Adventure), both created in 1902. Another pioneer of cinema was Bolesław Matuszewski, who became one of the first filmmakers working for the Lumière company - and the official "cinematographer" of the Russian tsars in 1897.