29/11/2024 - The UK-born director of Polish heritage breaks down his short film, which has been longlisted for the 2025 Academy Awards

Award-winning writer-director Paul Kowalski centres his films on identity, exile and obsession, often giving pride of place to dark psychologies and the supernatural. His US-Polish short film Sardinia has been longlisted for the 2025 Academy Awards, and we chatted to him about it.

Cineuropa: As a filmmaker with experience in both Europe and the USA, how do you navigate making films in different countries?
Paul Kowalski: I was born in the UK to Polish immigrants, grew up on four continents and now spend most of my time in LA. I’ve always been between countries, never fully representative of just one. Professionally, it can be frustrating not to be considered British or Polish enough, but I’ve come to embrace my strongest sense of home as a European in America. While studying directing at the American Film Institute Conservatory, I felt a sense of creative freedom and opportunity in the States – so I decided to stay. It ultimately doesn’t matter where or how a film is set up, but for me to feel connected, it must have a mix of cultures and some sort of outsider ethos – in the story itself, but ideally also with multicultural actors and an international crew.

How does this have an impact on your storytelling and how you approach your craft – as with your recent short Sardinia, for example?
Moving around so much in my youth meant constantly feeling different. But what once felt like a limitation ultimately defined my filmmaking voice: an affinity for stories about identity crises, and the psychology of alienation and exile. This lens shapes all of my projects in development, from The Housemaster, a psychological horror film set in an English boarding school and based on real-life experiences, to Next Friend, a thriller exploring the USA’s 2018 Zero Tolerance immigration policy of family separation. The same perspective also permeates my newest film, Sardinia, a dark, satirical short about a serious man (Philip Ettinger, from Paul Schrader’s First Reformed) trying to avoid catching a laughing plague in a growingly polarised and dystopian society. The film’s cultural intersections are key: from the opening scene, where an exotic bird carrying the contagion arrives from Sardinia to a US port, to the father played by Polish-American actor Olek Krupa, and the cast and crew of fellow immigrants hailing from places like France, Taiwan, Zambia, Macedonia, Mexico and South Korea.

What advice would you give European producers seeking partnerships or co-productions in the USA, especially for projects that explore nuanced, cross-cultural themes?
Filmmakers have always struggled to get their films made, and there’s something to be said for the uniqueness of each struggle shaping the final creative product – regardless of how it gets set up. In short, I believe the only reliable guide is to seek out a great story and hire the best director for it – those films have a habit of getting made and, ultimately, finding their audience. Sardinia, for instance, recently won the Grand Prize Best Director at the Flickers’ Rhode Island Film Festival and is now a frontrunner for the 2025 Best Live-action Short Academy Award. Its dark, satirical tone is unconventional for an Oscar film, but I think viewers are connecting with its exploration of universal pandemic-era anxiety, paranoia, isolation and societal polarisation. Every “no” I encountered (and there were many) – from funding to cast to locations – became an opportunity to rethink, refine and strengthen the film.