ANNA WYDRA

Anna Wydra, producer and owner of the film production company Otter Films. Oscar® nominated for Rabbit a la Berlin in the Short Documentary category. Awarded the prize for Best Producer at the Cracow Film Festival. Nominated for the Polish Film Institute Award – Best Foreign Promotion. Producer and production manager of many awarded films.

She decided to move to Warsaw and started studies at the Warsaw School of Economics, one of the best business schools in Poland. After that she easily found a job as a strategic planner in an advertising agency. She later worked in a public relations company and after that moved to work in a bank as a business analyst.

One day a friend called her and asked if she would like to take a shot at film production. He offered her a job as a production assistant on a feature film. She took several days off at the bank and after the project was finished, she decided to quit that suit-wearing institution.

The people she worked with on the shoot remembered her, highly valuing her organisational skills, and in this way she received some new offers. Anna went up from production assistant to production manager and finally producer pretty fast, and in 2006 she became head of production at Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing. During these few years of working in production she made over 40 films, both documentary and fiction.  Her project have been selected for international festivals all over the world and won many major prizes.

Today she says that working as a film producer gives her the opportunity to link a scientific way of thinking with an artistic one. On the one hand she has her numbers, she deals with business, financial plans and on the other hand she works with directors, scriptwriters which allows her to move into a different reality. She wants to and tries really hard to be a creative producer. She was not only the producer of Rabbit a la Berlin but also co-writer of the script. In the latest Bartek Konopka feature film Fear of Falling she was also assistant director. Before she takes up a new project she tries to deeply understand the artist’s vision. She wonders what message the viewer should get from that picture. This allows her to transform abstract artistic ideas into numbers and actions.

The most important thing for Anna is projects, especially life’s truths, which films are able to capture. She constantly repeats that the atmosphere is the most important thing during production. This is why she needs to ‘fall in love’ with a project before she agrees to join it. She believes that working on a film is like a long-term relationship – you can’t leave it in the middle of work. And just as in love, she gives herself totally to projects.