Marek Żebrowski: My German adventure

Just about that time, I began making connections in the world of film and through one of my friends, the iconic Polish film director, Jerzy Skolimowski, I met Marek Żydowicz, director of the CAMERIMAGE Film Festival in Poland. First held in Toruń in the early 1990s, CAMERIMAGE eventually moved to Łódź in 2000. After some late-night persuading in Los Angeles, Marek convinced me that I could help him – and the Festival – by being a link to the Hollywood film community. He invited me to the first edition of CAMERIMAGE in Łódź and the rest (as it is often said) is history. Quickly I began to help organize the Festival by overseeing its competition juries and editing a series of commemorative albums honoring each year the recipient of the Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. These two tasks – overseeing the juries and writing a new album published every year in November at the Festival – basically describe my duties and involvement in this during the past 25 years.

This is also how, in short succession, I met two great German cinematographers, Karl Prümm and Wolfgang Treu who served for many years on various CAMERIMAGE juries and gradually became close and valued friends. Volker Schlöndorff, the iconic German director and one of the early supporters of CAMERIMAGE, also became a dear friend and I had the honor of writing a book about him in 2009 when he was presented with one of the CAMERIMAGE Festival’s awards. A year later I befriended and wrote a book about Michael Ballhaus, another legendary German cinematographer, who received the CAMERIMAGE Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. In 2021, my book subject was the cinematographer Jost Vacano, another German friend of two decades, whose camera work (including the iconic Das Boot with Wolfgang Petersen) was recognized with the Lifetime Achievement Award at CAMERIMAGE.

In addition to meeting these pillars of German contemporary cinema, I had the great pleasure to meet the leading lights of German film industry representing such companies as ARRI, Zeiss, and Hawk, among many others. They were invariably charmed by the fact that we could converse with them in German (a legacy of my childhood tutor), and that my connection to film was only tangential, since most of my professional activities continued to be centered on music. 

It was the music connection that intrigued Prof. Dr. Karl Prümm and led to him inviting me to participate in the Kamerapreis Festival in Marburg in 2007 as a guest pianist performing a recital that also included some of the best-known music from Hollywood films. Held at the historic Marburg University Aula – a hallowed hall noted for being a venue for its most famous debate between Luther and Zwingli – my performance attracted not only the regular filmgoers but also almost all of my friends in the area: Joachim Kramer, Wolfgang Jungraithmayr and his family, Bernd Mlodoch, Frau von Geyr with her relatives and friends, and many others. I shall always relish the astonished faces of Marburg’s city officials and other filmmakers whom I introduced to this eclectic circle of my artistic, aristocratic and musical friends from Marburg. It was the moment when my German connections came full circle and the worlds of music and film suddenly found a common denominator in my presence among them. Dr. Prümm was delighted with the outcome as much as I was, and my friends as surprised as many others who saw me either as a musician or a member of the Hollywood establishment. 

In any case, even if during the past few years my visits in Germany were quite rare, I continue to keep in touch with those friends who are still around after all these years. Without a doubt, I shall always look forward to returning and reconnecting with my German friends, and to spending time with them, reminiscing about our joint adventures and discoveries throughout all these years.

Marek Żebrowski, October 2024