From Kieślowski to Munk, Polish film has a mighty past. Yet can today’s auteurs survive the interference of a government hostile to ‘whingeing, arty stuff’ that shows the world as ambiguous’?

It is a cold, misty afternoon in Warsaw and I am having tea with the Oscar-winning film-maker Paweł Pawlikowski in the elegant cafe belonging to the Hotel Bristol – a building that miraculously escaped the destruction of the second world war and the Warsaw Uprising. He is perennially exasperated by a political establishment he considers reactionary and philistine. Yet this same government is intensely aware of Poland’s cinematic tradition and the international prestige it brings.

“In Poland now,” he says, “there is a tendency to centralise power and get rid of things that are associated with the ‘elites’ or the ‘intelligentsia’. The ruling party’s electoral heartland is mainly in small towns and the countryside, so they’re not too worried about our kind of cinema. They are more concerned with the state media, which has a huge reach in the provinces. They have turned it into a tube for grotesque bilious propaganda. They are also interfering with theatres and museums that don’t toe their ideological line. Film-makers are inevitably free spirits, and they’re finding it much more difficult to co-opt us.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The government would love to see Hollywood-style movies’ … Paweł Pawlikowski in London in 2019. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

He pauses then adds: “The kind of cinema that the government would love to see is Hollywood-style movies with stars and stories about good guys and bad guys, ideally Polish heroes of the past. Not this whingeing, arty stuff that shows the world as complicated and ambiguous.” It’s a point of view that was reflected by the producers I met on my visit to Warsaw. They spoke ruefully about the Polish film industry churning out forgettable romcoms and gangster pictures, which nevertheless keeps the business very healthy. It’s a prosperous scene.

Pawlikowski worked for a long period in the UK, but has now returned to his home country, creating such admired movies as Ida (which won the foreign language Oscar in 2015) and Cold War (nominated in the same category last year). These were films that were concerned with Poland itself. “Directors here in Poland have created a directors’ guild that is quite tight-knit,” he says. “We meet regularly and support each other’s films. There is more of a film community here than what I experienced in Britain. And we have a common enemy, so there’s a sense of common purpose.”

It is an industry presided over by formidable ghosts, maestros and tutelary deities: Krzysztof Kieślowski, Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Żuławski, Andrzej Munk and Walerian Borowczyk. And, in our present day, Agnieszka Holland recently got the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival for her movie Spoor. Her new film, Mr Jones, which stars James Norton, is about the Welsh journalist who exposed the Soviet famine of 1932-33.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Norton in Agnieszka Holland’s Mr Jones. Photograph: Allstar/Film Produkcja

Małgorzata Szumowska is a brilliant film-maker from a younger generation who is gaining an audience, especially for such satires as the scabrous and nightmarish Mug. The same goes for Tomasz Wasilewski, who directed the sexual nightmare United States of Love. And, quite aside from all this arthouse prestige, there is the commercial fare pumped out by Patryk Vega, who is never mentioned in this august company but gets massive box-office numbers for his brash crowd-pleasing dramas and thrillers, from Women of Mafia to Plagi Braslau. Vega rips his storylines from the headlines: he is an exploitation director who cheerfully churns out profitable films. The auteurs of Poland are derisive about him (I heard the term “incredible illiterate idiot”), but there is a sneaking respect for his energy and productivity.

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Cinema is built into Poland’s postwar history. Once very much an arm of the communist state, the movie industry was financially nurtured but intensively policed and censored by the government, which was idealistic about the moral usefulness of cinema and famously founded the Łódź film school that produced Roman Polanski, Munk et al.

In the 1950s and 60s, film-makers worked slyly and subversively to criticise the authorities while notionally toe-ing the party line. As veteran director Krzysztof Zanussi once said about the incompetence and corruption of the state: “Because basic goods were in short supply, people turned to immaterial goods – film, art, religion and human solidarity.” The movie business was liberated after the overthrow of the communist government, and film-making became a producer-led industry, albeit one that still receives substantial subsidy.

Now the industry is in a state of flux. The producers and directors I spoke to are appalled that the government has just abolished all the individual state-funded studios – such as the legendary TOR, used by Kieślowski and Borowczyk – and merged them into one big studio: WFDiF (the Studio of Films, Documentaries and Fiction Features). Industry professionals fear this will be a big state monolith, like Russia’s Roskino. And they are also astonished by Brexit, not least from a commercial viewpoint. One sales agent said it would make distributing Polish films to British cinemas far more expensive.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A younger generation is gaining an audience … Tomasz Wasilewski’s United States of Love.

Having said that, the Polish Film Institute disburses the equivalent of €40m a year, and is widely credited with sponsoring a resurgent Polish cinematic identity. The Polish Cultural Institute – whose guest I was on this trip to Warsaw – is very proud of this body. In 2018, Polish cinema had another record-breaking year, with an all-time best result of 59.7m tickets sold and four domestic titles in the general box office Top 10.

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The government also bankrolls the country’s Camerimage film festival, held every November, and the political establishment is delighted it has become a destination for Hollywood stars, who show up to promote their movies during awards seasons. Some people I spoke to in Warsaw were vastly amused by culture minister Piotr Gliński, beamingly having his photograph taken with Quentin Tarantino. “He funds that festival just so he can have his picture taken with Tarantino!” said one.

I sat down with Szumowska to talk about this and Mug, her satirical parable about a young construction worker who gets a face transplant after being horribly injured while working on a giant statue of Jesus – inspired by Christ the King, a statue in western Poland, the tallest statue of Jesus in the world that is even bigger than the one in Rio de Janeiro and revered as a religious and nationalist symbol.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bradshaw with Małgorzata Szumowska in Warsaw. Photograph: Adam Lach/The Guardian

“Mug came out of frustration and anger about what was going on in Poland, but also a tenderness and nostalgia I have for my own nationality. Being a Polish director is very complicated. On the one hand, you love to be Polack – you love your country. On the other, you are frustrated by being Polish. It is a kind of stamp on your forehead: you are Polish, you are Polack, and you are going to stay polack for ever.”

She adds: “My son, who is 14, he doesn’t have this complex. He is proud to be Polish. I passed through so many stages: I was sorry that I was Polish – then proud that I was Polish. Crazy!”

Szumowska goes on to talk about her new movie, Wonder Żenia, a satire of the country’s emerging middle class: “They live in gated areas. It is a phenomenon. I am shooting my new movie in this kind of gated area just outside Warsaw. The people who made money in the last 20 years became capitalistic animals and they became the middle-class in Poland. They don’t want the poor people to participate. And they want Poland for Polish people: ‘We don’t have refugees, we don’t have people of colour, our economy is growing – we don’t have unemployment!’ It’s a very locked society, satisfied with what they are, what they have achieved.”

The relationship between the country’s politicians and its film-makers is complicated. The government, though apparently indifferent to many areas of the arts, is still interested in cinema as a thriving industry and a source of international prestige. As for the film business, it has a kind of satirical patriotism: however outraged film-makers are about the way the right has dominated the political establishment, this has galvanised many. And they are intensely aware of themselves as Poles and the Polish-ness of the films they are making.

•Agnieszka Holland’s Mr Jones and Małgorzata Szumowska’s The Other Lamb will screen at the Kinoteka Polish film festival in London, which runs from 19 March to 5 April

• This story was amended on 3 March 2020 to correct the spelling of several names.