Little Hamlet

In Little Hamlet, Skolimowski shows his predilection for the immature or dwarfed characters who would later populate his full-length films. Here a group of Warsaw proletarians meet in a destroyed building, consisting largely of stairs, littered with newspapers. A song from a record introduces the film characters as dwarfed versions of personas from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Hamles, Ofelka, Learcio.

Duration: 8
Production year: 1960
Country: Poland

Jerzy Skolimowski

Born in the city of Lódz in Poland, director Jerzy Skolimowski has embodied versatile talents - as a filmmaker, screenwriter, poet, playwright, painter and actor - in a filmography which is full of visual and narrative inventiveness.

Jerzy Skolimowski graduated in Ethnography from the Warsaw University and in Direction from the Lódz Film School, in 1962. At the same time as he began his work as a film director, he also participated in several films as an actor.

As one of the most particular voices of the New Wave of Polish cinema in the 1960s, Skolimowski has pursued a very particular artistic path, divided between Poland (his four initial and iconic works, after collaborating with Wajda and Polanski, and his three most recent films - Four Nights with Anna, Essential Killing and 11 Minutes - following a 17-year voluntary hiatus in filmmaking) and an artistic roaming through several countries and productions. His artistic gesture is crossed by a visionary, unusual capacity of capturing human beings facing their own time and circumstances.

With a body of work of more than 20 films, Jerzy Skolimowski has received several awards at the most important European film festivals, such as the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for the film The Departure (1967) and the Grand Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival for The Shout (1978). With Moonlighting (1982), starring Jeremy Irons, he won the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 2008, the year he returned to filmmaking, Skolimowski presented Four Nights with Anna at the Director’s Fortnight of the Cannes Film Festival. In 2011, his film Essential Killing, starring Vincent Gallo, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Jerzy Skolimowski was one of the guests of the 2015 edition of the LEFFEST and, in 2016, was honored with a special tribute and a retrospective of his work.

His most recent film EO (2022) won the Jury Prize and Best Soundtrack award at the 2022 edition of the Cannes Film Festival and is part of the official selection of the LEFFEST.

Original title: Hamles

Jerzy Skolimowski

Credits