Michał Bielawski

Michał Bielawski was born in Warsaw in 1974.

He graduated from the Humanities Department at the University of Warsaw. For ten years, he worked as a journalist for radio and television. In 2013, he received the Polish Film Institute Award for the TV program ONE SCENE. In the same year, he debuted with the feature documentary MUNDIAL. THE HIGHEST STAKES, in which he mixes the perspective of political prisoners of the communist regime with the story of the 1982 World Cup held in Spain.

His interest in history and sports are shown in “1989”, a documentary about the political transformation in Poland, and THE TEAM, a documentary about the Polish national volleyball team. His film, THE WIND, A DOCUMENTARY THRILLER, co-produced by HBO, is a journey into the community of Polish highlanders who are affected by an extremely destructive wind.

Accidents

LIM | Less is More 2019

ACCIDENTS is set in western, provincial Poland. Almost 40-year-old Tomek is a fitness instructor, a divorced husband, father of
a teenage girl and a loser. His ex-wife uses him for sex, people around him like him the most when he buys them drinks, even his daughter uses him as an alibi to meet her boyfriend. But Tomek is restless. He feels that he might have more affinity with the local criminals who show up in the neighbourhood bar. Tomek persuades them to employ him in their car-crashing business, namely an insurance scam they pull. The money is big. For Tomek, it is a promise of something better. Unexpectedly, his daughter knocks on his door, wanting to move in. She needs a place to meet her boyfriend. Tomek agrees. Confusion grows when the local criminals pay him a visit him to ask a favour. They need Tomek to steal a car in Berlin and drive it back to Poland. He agrees. But on his way back in the stolen car, he discovers that something’s gone wrong. The car isn’t going to stop.