‘The Zone of Interest’ Cinematographer and TIFF Variety Artisan Award Winner Lukasz Zal on the Quest to Capture Life’s ‘F—ing Beautiful Moments’

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When U.K. writer-director Jonathan Glazer approached Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal about “The Zone of Interest,” a provocative Holocaust drama adapted from a 2014 novel by Martin Amis, he had a…

, “The Zone of Interest” is playing this week in Toronto fresh off its North American premiere at Telluride.Courtesy of Cannes Film FestivalArtisan Award, which recognizes a distinguished creative who has excelled at their craft and made an outstanding contribution to cinema and entertainment.

That approach allows Żal to stay rooted in the world of each movie he shoots, a world he painstakingly creates through an intensely collaborative effort with each of his directors. In the past decade, the 42-year-old has worked with acclaimed filmmakers including Pawlikowski, Academy Award winner and three-time nominee, Swedish director and festival darling Magnus von Horn and maverick Russian filmmaker Alexey German Jr. .

His father was an amateur photographer, a self-appointed family historian who took photos and home videos at family events. “He liked gadgets. There were always cameras in our house,” Żal says. In his collection was an old six-by-six, medium-format camera manufactured by the Polish company Start that was the first camera produced in the country after World War II. “It was very out of focus. It was almost like a pinhole camera. The image was so crazy,” Żal recalls.

Żal fell in with an arty crowd in high school, where he began to discover poetry and music and cinema. He enrolled in a workshop led by lecturers from the celebrated Łódź Film School and learned to make analog prints and develop film. At night, the lecturers set up a 35mm projector and screened movies in the school gymnasium. “We were going to bed three, four o’clock every night, watching films,” Żal recalls. “That was the moment I fell in love with cinema, with cinematography.

Then, Żal was involved in a grisly car accident that left him with two broken legs. During a long period of convalescence, he considered putting down his camera and finding a different line of work, setting himself a one-year deadline to turn things around. On his first job back, still hobbling on one leg, he shot a short documentary, “Paparazzi,” with his friend, the director Piotr Bernas.

Żal’s work on “Ida,” for which he received a co-credit as director of photography, earned him an Academy Award nomination, and the movie scooped the Oscar for best foreign-language film. Four years later, he would again team up with Pawlikowski — and earn another Oscar nod — for the jazz-inflected period drama “Cold War,” a sweeping portrait of a star-crossed romance spanning 15 years after World War II.

 

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