Contact
Urząd Miasta Krakowa
Wydział Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego
ul. Wielopole 17A , 31–072 Kraków
pl en

Krakow in the film

by Kraków Heritage team
14.03.2023
Krakow in the film Krakow in the film
What film stories can be discovered in the city of Wajda and Polański? Let us take a walk in the footsteps of the most important cinematic images shot at the foot of Wawel Hill.

The historic alleys of Krakow have already served as a location for Jim Carrey and Bollywood superstars on the silver screen, but the city of Wajda, Wojciech Jerzy Has, and Polański has many more stories to tell film lovers. Which ones are particularly worth mentioning here?

From Spielberg to Kieślowski, or old Kraków on the silver screen

In the mind of professional and amateur historians of cinema, Krakow is primarily known as the scene where Schindler’s List unfolded. Indeed, Steven Spielberg’s famous film from 1993, based on the true story of 1,200 Polish Jews saved from the Holocaust by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, is not only a timeless masterpiece of cinema but also a picture that brought the first foreign tourists to the foot of the Wawel Hill, back at the onset of the political transformation, to change the city forever.

A standard tour of Krakow cannot omit the original building of the Oskar Schindler Enamel Factory, today home of a branch of the Krakow Museum with a stirring exhibition presenting the times of occupation, Liban Quarry where the KL Plaszow camp was reconstructed (in fact, located slightly farther away, over the edge of the quarry), and the charming backyard at ul. Meiselsa, which played the Krakow ghetto (actually set up by the Nazis across the river, in the eastern part of the Podgórze district).

But the cinematic Krakow can also be seen in the key scene on the Main Market Square, included in the famous Double Life of Véronique from 1991, the work of Krzysztof Kieślowski, a master of the ‘cinema of moral unrest’. It appears also in Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (1976), in which the Polish director, awarded with an Oscar for his life’s work, captured Krakow’s younger sister – Nowa Huta – trapped between the communist propaganda slogans and the tough reality of an ordinary worker’s life. The old, bourgeois town passing through the transformation with varying luck, immortalised in films after Jerzy Pilch’s prose – The List of Adulteresses by Jerzy Stuhr from 1994 or the sombre The Mighty Angel by the expressive voice of contemporary Polish cinema, Wojciech Smarzowski, from 2014.

The list could go on…

The city of filmmakers

However, Krakow is not only a static open-air location but a formative place and a living space of memories for many first-league directors and cinema people. It was here where Roman Polański spent his childhood and the drama of the occupation; luckily, he survived the ghetto. His selected Krakow addresses, including the apartment of his friend, photographer Ryszard Horowitz, but also Hala Targowa (Market Hall) beloved by Kraków residents’ and sausages sold out of a blue van that they would eat there at night (the so-called ‘sausages from the Nyska’, after the model of the van), are presented in the 2021 film Polański, Horowitz. Hometown.

The aforementioned Polish cinema doyen, Andrzej Wajda, has his own story with Krakow, too. It was here that he studied, he took his first steps as a playwright in theatre, which became a prelude for his great directing career. it was on his initiative that, opposite the Wawel Royal Castle, the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology was built in the early 1990s, to become home to a wonderful art collection from the Land of the Flowering Cherry and contemporarily understood culture. The director’s grave can be found in the picturesque Salwator Cemetery, located at the foot of the Kościuszko Mound in the residential district of Salwator.

Wojciech Jerzy Has, the master of surrealist adaptations of literature, including Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (directed in 1964, and much-loved by connoisseurs), and Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (directed in 1973), closes the list of personalities of cinema subjectively deemed as worthy of a special mention. For the needs of the latter picture, an unusual film town inspired by Schulz’s hometown of Drohobycz was created in an old quarry in Skałki Twardowskiego. On the internet, you can also find a short film My City from 1950, in which Wojciech Jerzy Has pays tribute to Krakow of his childhood: a half-imaginary city, whose space was marked out by ‘the house, the side street and the yard’.

Krakow for filmmakers and all things film and filmmaking

Kraków Heritage
Krakow has an innovative mechanism enabling support for film productions related to the city and the whole of the Małopolska region. Since 2009, the Competition for Supporting Film Production within the Regional Film Fund has contributed to the creation of over 30 feature, documentary, and animated films. Among the projects co-financed so far, there have been such productions as the previously mentioned Pod mocnym aniołem (The Mighty Angel) directed by Wojciech Smarzowski (2014), Uwikłanie (Entanglement) directed by Jacek Bromski (2011), Maria Skłodowska-Curie, directed by Marie Noëlle (2016), and Demon, directed by Marcin Wrona (2015).
Kraków Heritage
The operator of the Regional Film Fund is the Krakow Film Commission (KFC), operating within the structures of the Krakow Festival Office (KBF), a city cultural institution. KFC website:
Kraków Heritage
The Krakow Film Cluster brings together institutions, professional companies, organisations, and artists from the film industry, building the image of Krakow as a film city:
Kraków

No, this is not all there is to say about Krakow. Heritage is an open-ended collection – it’s up to us to fill it with meaning!

By using this website you agree to our use of cookies. You can change settings regarding cookies at any time and also learn more about them