Camerimage returns to Torun, Poland, from Nov. 7-14 for its 34th edition, and founder Marek Zydowicz is using the moment to spell out the festival’s Camerimage AI policy: work made entirely by generative systems will not be programmed in competition. The rule sits alongside a broader argument he has pressed since launching the event in 1993 — that cinematographers are creative authors, not camera operators.
A Clear Boundary on Machine-Made Cinema
Zydowicz said the festival will keep watching fully AI-generated films so its programmers understand the technology, but selection remains centered on the cinematographer’s contribution to storytelling. He is personally receptive to hybrid productions in which the performers appearing on screen decide how far AI may alter their images. Any use of the technology, he added, must respect the personal rights of the people whose likenesses and voices are involved.
The founder described AI as an inevitable part of filmmaking’s future, with the real question being how the industry chooses to use it. He wants the debate to lead toward legal safeguards, pointing to possible regulation at European Union level. Camerimage has scheduled dedicated discussions and workshops on the subject this year.
Why Aronofsky Is Being Honored
The decision to give Darren Aronofsky the festival’s director award has drawn attention because the filmmaker has been outspoken about adopting AI. Zydowicz expects the choice to provoke discussion, but framed the prize as recognition of more than three decades of work rather than an endorsement of any production method.
He praised Aronofsky’s willingness to unsettle audiences and to examine sides of human nature people would rather avoid. The founder cited the intensity of Requiem for a Dream, the disturbed perspective at the center of Black Swan, the visual ambition of The Fountain and the intimacy of The Whale. Aronofsky’s interest in new tools, Zydowicz said, reflects a curiosity that has run through his career, and the festival welcomes open disagreement about his experiments.
Editors, Cinematographers and the Craft Debate
Joe Walker, known for his work with Denis Villeneuve on Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and the Dune films, will receive an award and chair the Main Competition jury. Zydowicz highlighted Walker’s collaborations with Steve McQueen, from Hunger to 12 Years a Slave and Widows, as evidence of a rare sensitivity to performance, shot duration and silence.
Polish cinematographer Janusz Kaminski will accept The Hollywood Reporter’s Visionary award while Disclosure Day screens in competition. Zydowicz called Kaminski one of cinema’s greatest cinematographers and pointed to Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which earned the Golden Frog, as proof of a career that extends well beyond his partnership with Steven Spielberg.
On the industry’s treatment of cinematographers, Zydowicz offered a mixed assessment. Awards exist in several countries, he noted, yet most mainstream coverage names only directors and actors. The phrase “below the line,” he argued, describes a production hierarchy but says little about artistic authorship. A cinematographer, in his view, shapes atmosphere, emotion and the audience’s connection to characters.
Polish Roots and the Human Eye
Asked why Poland has produced so many celebrated cinematographers, Zydowicz traced the answer to history. During 123 years of partition, paintings and graphic works kept national hopes alive, he said, and that tradition of visual expression later fed into the Lodz Film School. Under communist censorship, filmmakers learned to let images carry meanings that dialogue could not state openly, while isolation from Western developments forced original solutions.
He sees financial pressure and anxiety about AI as the main challenges facing below-the-line artists, particularly younger filmmakers entering a world saturated with images whose origins are hard to verify. Even so, he argued that a generated cannot replace a cinematographer’s lifetime of observations, relationships and split-second decisions on set. Technology will alter methods, he said, but the human perspective that gives film its spiritual dimension remains essential.
Zydowicz also welcomed the growing presence of women in a field long dominated by men, naming Jolanta Dylewska, the 2011 Golden Frog winner who returns to the Main Competition this year with Through the Wall.
A Festival Still Growing
Camerimage now draws about 70,000 attendees annually, including roughly 1,000 film school students and some 800 cinematographers from more than 80 countries. The European Film Center Camerimage, built in Torun with Polish government support at a cost of around $200 million, will house an education center, a roughly 4,000-square-meter exhibition and trade fair space, a screening auditorium seating more than 1,600 and a House of Cinema complex. It will also contain an exhibition of David Lynch artifacts, which Zydowicz said he is designing according to plans he agreed with Lynch.
For first-time visitors, his advice was to arrive with a schedule but stay open to detours, to join question-and-answer sessions and workshops, and to talk with the artists. The encounters outside the screening room, he suggested, often prove as valuable as the films themselves.
