Polish national film archives

Conservation and digitalization of the oldest films from the collection of the National Film Archive in Warsaw


  Many pre-war Polish feature films remain missing. Those that were miraculously found - for instance in private collections - are often in such bad shape that running them through a classic projector would ensure their complete and irreversible damage. Thanks to the possibilities offered by digitization and time-lapse, frame-by-frame digital restoration, restored films can be seen today not only in cinemas or on DVD, but also on the Internet.

The NITROFILM project, Filmoteka Narodowa (The National Film Archive) digitised 43 pre-war films made on a highly flammable nitro base and restored three silent productions: “Mania. Story of a cigarette factory worker”, “Pan Tadeusz” and “The Call of the sea”. Each of the three films had their grand re-premieres.

Schindlers List Location

Themes and symbolism

The film explores the theme of good versus evil, using as its main protagonist a "good German", a popular characterization in American cinema. While Göth is characterized as an almost completely dark and evil person, Schindler gradually evolves from Nazi supporter to rescuer and hero. Thus a second theme of redemption is introduced as Schindler, a disreputable schemer on the edges of respectability, becomes a father figure responsible for saving the lives of more than a thousand people.

Schindlers list

Why was this film shot in black and white?

Primarily for reasons of authenticity, realism, and also to make it feel like a historic documentation, since it is a true story. Spielberg himself has given this explanation as well, further motivating this artistic choice with the fact that almost all real documentation of the Holocaust he has seen has always been in black and white. To enhance the documentary feeling, the movie was primarily shot with handheld cameras, and contains no crane shots. Director of photography Janusz Kaminski has further added that black and white contributes to the agelessness of the movie, something the makers strove very hard for. For symbolic reasons, the little girl in the red coat, the tribute at Schindler's grave, and the beginning (the flames from the candles) are the only bits of color in the movie and it makes things stand out a little bit more.

Krakau Poland

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, and Jerzy Skolimowski impacted the development of Polish filmmaking. 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.

Loving Vincent

The art form of film is different from painting. Painting is one particular moment in time, frozen. Film is fluid, seeming to move through space and time. So first we had a Painting Design team spent one-year re-imagining Vincent’s painting into the medium of film. These paintings along with the storyboard and Computer Generated Layout Animatic formed the basis on which to plan our live action shoot.

All the characters in Loving Vincent are performed by real actors either on specially constructed sets, designed to look like Vincent’s paintings, or against Green Screens with the Loving Vincent Design Paintings composited in through a live view system on the set.

The live action material was then combined with Computer Animation for elements such as birds, horses, clouds and blowing leaves and composited together with the Design Paintings to create the Reference Material for the Painting Animation.