March 1, 2026
If there is one city in Poland that you need to know if you love cinema, it is certainly Łódź. For more than a century now, Łódź has been the Polish city of film.
The Advent of the city of film
All the inventions of the film industry did not take a long time to arrive in Łódź. In 1860, as a Łódź inhabitant, you could discover the stereoscope thanks to which you could see images in 3D. At Piotrowska 65, there was a fotoplastikon in a room, where even 25 people could simultaneously use a stereoscope. The mutoscope, a device that allowed one person to see a movie also came along around the same time. There were also many cinemas in the film capital. Around 1910, for one inhabitant of Łódź there was the same amount of movie theatres that for one inhabitant of Warsaw.
The city was an important place for distributors but not yet for film production. Borys Mickun, the director of Vita Films, tried to produce the movie Raj with the help of amateurs. However due to financial issues he never succeeded and actually left the city before getting arrested. In 1927, one film managed to be produced in Łódź and got some success, it was Ziemia obiecana.
Łódź, the place to film in Poland
But really quickly it changed and Lodz became a usual place for film directors. 200 movies had been directed in Łódź before 1939 and a lot more filmmaking took place after the war. The most common places to appear on screen were Fabryczna station, Piotrkowska street or the various palaces that were built in the city, like the Scheibler Palace that now hosts the Museum of Cinematography.
Ida by Paweł Pawlikowski or Inland Empire by David Lynch were filmed in Łódź for instance.
The streets of Łódź were also used to depict several other cities. In Miasto 44 and Vabank, two famous Polish movies, the city represented Warsaw for instance.
Cinema creation in Łódź
But Łódź is not only a place where directors are coming to shoot. This is also a place where new movies are created, where people are working on techniques and scenarios.
The current national film school of Poland is the Łódź Film School. It opened in 1948. The school trains future actors, directors, producers etc. Jolanta Dylewska, Wojciech Has, Jan Komasa, Barbara Sass or Krzysztof Kieślowski graduated from the school for instance.
You also can find several producing companies and feature film studios as for instance the one that produced the movie Ida : Opus Film.
Until 2018 we could also find the film and animation studio SE MA FOR that produced Peter and the Wolf, an animation movie that won the Academy award in 2008 for best animated short film.
Author : Anne Borkowski