Camerimage Founder Marek Zydowicz on AI, Aronofsky

Camerimage, the world’s premier festival devoted to the art of cinematography, turns 34 this year, and it arrives in Torun, Poland, Nov. 7-14, with its founder in both a combative and reflective mood.

Marek Zydowicz, who launched the event in 1993 to champion cinematographers and other below-the-line artists the industry treated as mere technicians, is fielding questions on a thorny set of issues. Among them: the rise of generative AI, which gets its own debates and workshops this year; the squeeze on budgets and theatrical releases; and the decision to honor Darren Aronofsky, an outspoken AI adopter, with the festival’s director award.

Joe Walker, the editor behind Dune and 12 Years a Slave, is also being feted and will chair the Main Competition jury, while Polish cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, whose Disclosure Day is screening in contention, receives THR’s Visionary award.

Speaking to THR ahead of this year’s fest, Zydowicz said Camerimage will remain open to a “diversity of techniques and technologies” but draws the line at fully AI-generated films.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Zydowicz spoke about the festival’s growing ambitions, the reason why Poland seems to produce so many great cinematographers, and why the human eye will never be replaced.

Why are there so many extraordinary Polish cinematographers? What’s the secret?

A full answer would require going quite far back into the history of Polish cinema, and even further, to the period when Poland was partitioned. For 123 years, paintings and graphic works depicting the most important events in our nation’s history sustained our hopes of regaining independence and stirred our imaginations and dreams. After the second World War, this tradition of depicting the past played an enormously important role in laying the foundations of the Lodz Film School.

Artists working under communist censorship often drew on the same ways of expressing what could not be said openly as their predecessors had in the nineteenth century. Sometimes the dialogue between characters told one story while the images suggested another. This encouraged the development of an extraordinary sensitivity and a search for ways of using composition to smuggle forbidden content and aesthetics into films. Technological limitations and Poland’s isolation from the most progressive developments in Western culture made it necessary to find original solutions of our own.

During those difficult times, Polish filmmakers absorbed different cinematic traditions, both those that reached us legally and those that were banned and smuggled in from Western Europe and America. The relationship between the director and the cinematographer became an important factor in the creation of original forms of cinematic imagery.

Many outstanding filmmakers taught in Lodz, and later at other Polish film schools as well. The film school taught the history of painting, and not only Polish painting. Over successive generations, an exceptionally strong artistic tradition emerged from this. That is what we see today in the diversity of Polish cinematographers’ work: from Hollywood productions to independent and art cinema around the world.

Why did you choose Darren Aronofsky for your director honor this year? Do you expect a debate around his embrace of AI in production, which is still a very controversial subject in the industry?

I do expect that discussion, because AI is an important and contentious subject, and Darren has shown that he wants to explore it professionally. Our award recognizes over thirty years of his filmmaking. His body of work provokes, unsettles and asks us to confront aspects of human nature from which we might prefer to look away. His films can be difficult to watch, but it is often precisely that discomfort that makes us look more closely at ourselves and others. His artistic achievements deserve awards.

Think of the intensity with which Requiem for a Dream conveys the experience of addiction, or the way Black Swan draws us into its protagonist’s increasingly disturbed perception of reality. The Fountain explores love, mortality and spiritual longing through an extraordinarily ambitious visual imagination. It is a film I admire enormously, also for the risks it took and the resistance it encountered. The Whale, made on an entirely different scale, finds another way to bring us close to suffering and the desire for human connection.

Darren moves between intimacy and spectacle, tenderness and brutality, sometimes bringing religious imagery into stories about deeply personal struggles. His films encourage audiences to question their own values and to notice people whose pain might otherwise go unseen. This combination of formal boldness and concern for human beings is one of the most important reasons we are honouring him.

His interest in AI is a separate discussion, although it also reflects his continuing curiosity about the tools available to filmmakers. We are not presenting this award as a judgement on how he uses the technology. I do, however, appreciate his willingness, as an established artist, to explore unfamiliar territory. That curiosity has been evident throughout his career. We should discuss his experiments openly, including the disagreements they provoke.

What is Camerimage’s policy towards AI — would you accept AI-generated work in your selection?

We do not accept productions generated entirely by AI. Our selection focuses on the art of cinematographers. Of course, to understand AI as a tool for creating moving images, we watch films made entirely with AI. Personally, I am in favour of hybrid films in which the live actors appearing in them decide for themselves how far AI may intervene in the images being created.

Within cinematography, we are open to a diversity of techniques and technologies, but always with respect for artists’ personal rights. A film may use extensive visual effects and digital post-production, or it may be made with very limited resources and rely almost entirely on techniques achieved on set, but it should always respect the wishes of the people lending their likenesses and voices. We value the cinematographer’s creative contribution to telling a story through film. Advanced digital techniques have long been part of that process.

AI will, in time, find its proper place in this process. Everyone will use it. The only question is how. For now, curiosity about the future does not change our principles for selecting films for the festival competitions. The subject remains open, and we want to discuss it with a view to bringing about legal regulations, for example at European Union level, that will make AI safe for our industry.

Explain the reasoning behind your other honoree, Joe Walker.

Joe Walker is an outstanding editor whose work we have admired and presented for many years. His collaborations with Denis Villeneuve, including Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and the Dune films, demonstrate the expressive possibilities of editing on very different scales. He has helped give these films their distinctive rhythms and their ability to make an audience understand something before it is explained in words. In Arrival, the organization of time is fundamental to the way we experience the story. In Dune, the editing helps maintain the connection between a vast, complex world and the characters moving through it.

His work with Steve McQueen, from Hunger to 12 Years a Slave and Widows, reveals an equally extraordinary sensitivity to performance, the duration of shots and silence. We are interested in how his editing gives images the power to affect us and shape the relationship between what we see and what we feel. This makes his contribution particularly relevant to a festival devoted to visual storytelling. We are delighted to honour him in Torun and give audiences the opportunity to speak with him about his films after their screenings. He has also agreed to chair the Main Competition jury. The eye of an editor with his experience and sensitivity brings a valuable perspective to a competition that means so much to us.

THR is honoring Poland’s own Janusz Kaminski with its Visionary award this year. How would you sum up his contribution to the art of cinematography?

We could easily devote the rest of this interview to Janusz’s contribution and still leave a great deal unsaid. He is one of the greatest cinematographers in the history of cinema. He created images that have become part of our shared cinematic memory in Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. I am very interested in his search for the right form for the story contained in a screenplay. He chooses an approach to imagery that will fully convey its emotional truth.

Our festival recognized The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, for which Janusz received the Golden Frog. It is a beautiful, painful and deeply moving film, with an extraordinary ability to bring us into another person’s experience. The cinematography is inseparable from that achievement. It reminds us that we should appreciate Janusz’s work beyond his collaboration with that brilliant and iconic master of cinema, Steven Spielberg.

This year, I invited another of their films, Disclosure Day, to the Main Competition. Janusz’s unsettling cinematography, with frequent halation creating a sense of the presence of something unknown and alien, is crucial to the film as a whole.

Janusz is a “visionary”, and his images have a profound effect on audiences and young filmmakers.

Camerimage has traditionally championed the cinematographer as an artist in their own right, rather than simply a technical collaborator. Do you think the industry is doing enough to recognize the creative contribution of cinematographers, particularly during awards season?

I would say both yes and no. Cinematography awards are presented in several places around the world. At the same time, most mainstream media coverage of films names only directors and actors, leaving out the cinematographers.

The term “below the line” has an established meaning in the organization of a production, but it says very little about the artistic role of the people it describes. A cinematographer helps determine how we experience a film’s story and how closely we connect with its characters. They create the atmosphere of every frame on screen and the emotions and feelings of the characters. They are an artist, not a technician operating a camera.

Our role is to help people understand and appreciate the artistry involved in this work, and to ensure that these artists have appropriate working conditions. Awards season is one opportunity to do this, but the conversation should continue throughout the year.

What are the biggest challenges you see facing cinematographers and other below-the-line artists at the moment?

Financial pressure is certainly one, particularly when filmmakers are expected to do more with fewer resources. There is also considerable anxiety about AI and what it may mean for people’s livelihoods. I understand those concerns, although I do not believe that an artist’s contribution can simply be replaced by a generated image. A cinematographer brings a lifetime of observations, relationships, emotions and experiences of the world to their work. All of this can inform a decision made on set in a fraction of a second. It has a decisive influence on the power of the moving image being created. Technology will change working methods, but I am certain that the human perspective which gives films a spiritual dimension remains indispensable.

Younger filmmakers face a particular kind of pressure because they have grown up amid an almost constant influx of images and information. They are also entering a world in which it will become increasingly difficult to judge how an image was made and whether it records something that actually happened. I am cautious about generational labels, but these conditions are worth recognizing. My generation grew up with different constraints, so I would not pretend that our experiences are the same. Every generation has to understand its own circumstances and find a way to navigate them.

There are also encouraging changes, including the growing participation of women in film productions dominated by men for decades. Jolanta Dylewska, who won our Golden Frog in 2011 and returns to the Main Competition this year [as the cinematographer of Through the Wall], is one of the artists who helped break down those barriers. It is wonderful to see so many women creating outstanding work today.

How would you describe the identity of Camerimage in 2026?

Our identity remains rooted in the idea I set out at the first edition of the festival in 1993: Let us recognize excluded and marginalised artists, the cinematographers whom the industry largely treats as technicians. We want audiences to discover what images contribute to their experience of film.

TorunCamerimage is a spiritual spa for film artists, who can talk here, free from pressure, about the language of the moving image and its significance in the contemporary world and in the future. There are occasional incidents and attempts to exert aggressive pressure on us as organisers, and on me as the founder and director of TorunCamerimage, but never between our guests. We will remain independent, respecting artistic and humanistic values.

How has it changed over more than 30 years of operation, and what do you want the festival to become in the future?

The most obvious change is the scale. We began in Torun, with a venue that was not a professional cinema. We searched for a suitable location in Poland and returned to Torun, whose authorities decided, together with the Polish government, to build the European Film Center Camerimage at a cost of around $200 million.

The festival has grown, with an average annual attendance of around 70,000 across its events. Around 1,000 film school students and some 800 cinematographers from around the world attend, along with several hundred other creative professionals from our industry. In recent years, we have welcomed guests from more than 80 countries.

Alongside the film studio, the European Film Center Camerimage will have an education centre, an exhibition and trade fair centre of around 4,000 square metres dedicated to presenting filmmaking techniques and technologies, and a large screening auditorium with more than 1,600 seats, capable of accommodating a wide variety of projection technologies. The complex will be completed by the House of Cinema, with several cinemas, including an IMAX-type auditorium, and the David Lynch’s World of Imagination. David gave me more than a dozen shipping containers of artefacts from Twin Peaks. I am working on the exhibition design that I agreed with David and that we intended to realise together.

What advice do you have for a first-time Camerimage attendee?

Come with a plan, but leave room to change it. Choose the films and events you particularly want to attend, remembering that schedules will overlap and some screenings may be full. An unexpected alternative may turn out to be the most valuable experience of your entire visit. We have seen this many times. Be active. Talk to the artists and other audience members. Take part in the Q&As after screenings and in workshops at Camerimage Film Studio. The festival continues beyond the screening room, as people share impressions, disagree, get to know one another and sometimes find the beginnings of a future collaboration. A little spontaneity and courage can take you a long way at TorunCamerimage.