Richard Kwietniowski

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Richard Kwietniowski (originally Richard Dessent ; born March 17, 1957 , London , England ) is a British author and director .

Life

Richard's father Leszek Kwietniowski originally came from Katowice and fled in 1939 on his 17th birthday via Romania and France to Great Britain, where he met his future wife Pam Dessent and trained as an RAF pilot in Scotland . Richard grew up in England, but because of his Polish roots (after his father's death, he had his naturalized surname Dessent changed to his father's surname) and his homosexuality , he felt like an outsider at an early age.

Richard Kwietniowski studied at the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of California at Berkeley and began his directing career in the mid-1980s with experimental short films. His first short film in collaboration with the Bristol Film and Video Workshop created Next Week's Rent (1986) tells the autobiographical experiences on the leading actor and screenwriter Malcolm Massiah -based love story between two very different boys in Bristol. With his second short film Alfalfa (1987), in the 9 minutes of which he presented an alternative interpretation of the alphabet based on gay slang, he was invited to the Berlinale in 1988 , where the film won the gay and lesbian Teddy Award for Best Short Film .

His next films were The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1988), a modern take on Oscar Wilde's famous defense speech after his first trial in 1895, in which Wilde (voiced by Quentin Crisp ) describes "the love that dares not reveal its name" ( the love that dare not speak its name ) for "selfless noblest form affection" ( noblest form of affection ) declared, and Flames of Passion (1989), a gay tribute to David Lean's classic Brief Encounter from 1945, for which he on the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival 1990 accepted the audience award.

After some television documentaries (including Pride '91 about the “Gay Pride 1991” demonstration in London) and other short films such as Actions Speak Louder Than Words (1992), which was shot exclusively in British Sign Language , in which 6 deaf and mute actors staged the interfaces between the Tracing the cultures of homosexuals and the hearing impaired, Kwietniowski began working on his first feature film Life and Death on Long Island (Love and Death on Long Island) based on the novel of the same name by Gilbert Adair , which in turn is a modern variation on Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice . Kwietniowski wrote the script and then spent 18 months finding financial support for the film. The comedy, finally financed with the help of various companies in Italy, Canada and Great Britain, about the reclusive British writer Giles De'Ath ( John Hurt ), who is wrong in the cinema, has to watch a flat teen comedy instead of a sophisticated EM Forster film in love with the main actor, an American girl idol ( Jason Priestley ), had its premiere in 1997 at the Cannes Film Festival and was shown in cinemas in 1998. The film received benevolent reviews and various awards ( Carl Foreman Award for the best young talent at the BAFTA Awards ; New York Film Critics Circle Award for the best debut film; FIPRESCI Prize at the Chicago International Film Festival ) and played over 2, $ 5 million a.

In 2001, Kwietniowski made his second feature film, Owning Mahowny , based on the true story of the gambling addict Canadian bank manager Brian Molony , who quickly "borrows" over $ 10 million from his bank to finance his casino stays. The film, with its excellent cast with Philip Seymour Hoffman , Minnie Driver and John Hurt , premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2003 , was shown in Panorama at the Berlinale 2003 and was nominated in Germany for the International Literary Film Award. Despite the critical praise (especially for Hoffman's portrayal), Owning Mahowny did not have much commercial success.

Since 2006, Kwietniowski has been working on the preparation of his third feature film, which will be entitled No One Gets Off in This Town .

Filmography (selection)

Short films

  • 1986: Next Week's Rent (also production)
  • 1987: Alfalfa (also screenplay)
  • 1988: The Ballad of Reading Gaol (also screenplay)
  • 1989: Flames of Passion (also screenplay)
  • 1989: Girls in Boy Bars
  • 1991: Proust's Favorite Fantasy
  • 1991: The Cost of Love (also screenplay)
  • 1991: Personal Best

Feature films

Documentaries

  • 1991: Pride '91
  • 1992: Actions Speak Louder Than Words
  • 1993: Without Walls: Lolita Unclothed (co-directed with Peter Stuart)
  • 1994: A Night with Derek (film in memory of Derek Jarman )
  • 1995: A Night with Derek II (new cut)
  • 1998: A Beginner's Guide to Coming Out

Others

  • 1996: I Was a Jewish Sex Worker (co-camera; director: Phillip B. Roth; with Annie Sprinkle , Rosa von Praunheim )
  • 2002: Regret Not Speaking (screenplay, unfilmed)

literature

  • Mark Finch & Richard Kwietniowski: Melodrama and Maurice: Homo is Where the Heart is , Screen, 29 (3), Glasgow, 1988

swell

  1. ↑ http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/82/a4230082.shtml  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.bbc.co.uk  
  2. ↑ http://www.hollywood.com/celebritydetail/Richard_Kwietniowski/192488
  3. ↑ http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/295550
  4. ↑ http://www.planetout.com/popcornq/db/getfilm.html?49

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kwietniowski, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer and director
DATE OF BIRTH March 17, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH London , England