Łukasz Palkowski, director of such productions as “Gods”, “Belfer”, “Langet” and “Duel” (a film with Jakub Gierszał and Julia Pietrucha, which will debut on cinema screens next year), during the second edition of BNP Paribas Warsaw SerialCon, will chair the international jury that will select the Best Polish Series of the Year 2025. The nominees include “Przesmyk”, “Zatoka spies”, “Breslau” and “Black Death”, “The Office 5 PL”, “A Decent Man”, “A Minute of Silence 2”, “Aniel” and “Heweliusz”. In an interview with Interia before the press conference inaugurating the latest edition of the series fans’ festival, Łukasz Palkowski told us what the series means to him and why Polish series creators have not had to be ashamed of anything for a long time.
See also: A place that focuses on TV series. BNP Paribas Warsaw SerialCon begins
Katarzyna Ulman, Interia: The 2nd edition of BNP Paribas Warsaw SerialCon is starting. Today is very intense – the conference is about to start and the Opening Gala in the evening.
Łukasz Palkowski: We are all looking forward to this day. I am very pleased that I can take part in this event, especially since, to brag a little, I contributed to the development of TV series in Poland a long time ago by making “Belfra” and I am extremely happy that my colleagues absolutely went beyond everything I could have done.
What does the series mean to you?
– We used to watch series as single episodes, each of them was a small movie. Currently, we watch very long feature films with a compact structure, which do not forget that each episode should have its own dramatic structure and the whole thing must be connected. This is working better and better not only in the world, but also in our country. In my opinion, we are no different from the entire world of TV series – we tell more and more universal stories; when it comes to the level of implementation, we are in the same place as others, and sometimes higher.
– Let us remember that we do not yet operate with the same budgets as our foreign colleagues, but we can deliver equally exciting stories that we do not have to be ashamed of. It’s a bad term in general, because we probably shouldn’t use it for ourselves. We haven’t had anything to be ashamed of for a very long time.
During this year’s edition of the festival, you will chair the international jury that will select the best Polish series. Have the works and talks already started?
– We are watching everything at the moment, we haven’t started our discussions yet. There are a few things ahead of me to watch, some of them I had to catch up on, which I’m extremely happy about, because it’s an excellent experience – it means combining a lot of domestic productions in one time block. If I watched them regularly, I wouldn’t have a chance to make such a comparison, and I don’t think I’m looking for who is the best here, because it seems to me that it’s a bit like judging your own colleagues, which I don’t like.
– However, what is interesting is that we compare our achievements primarily to foreign juries, which I chair, but I would not like to be the chairman who imposes my opinion and pushes for something that others might disagree with. I am primarily interested in how the foreign jury will perceive our series, how universal our stories were, how much they understood them, how much they fell in love with them. This is extremely interesting to me, because TV results or a foreign streamer’s results are one thing, and a direct conversation and confrontation of what we showed with what was received by the audience is another thing.
See also: Interia is the media patron of BNP Paribas Warsaw SerialCon. You can read about the details of the event HERE