A leading Polish director whose films are most influenced by those of his countryman Andrzej Wajda, Kieslowski began making documentaries which focused on the cultural, political and economic problems which sparked the emergence of the Solidarity movement. His award-winning 1979 feature, "Camera Buff", a slyly humorous, satirical look at life in a corrupt provincial factory, may have had personal dimensions for Kieslowski as it depicts a filmmaker who exposes himself to both attention and criticism when he progresses from home movies to committed social documentaries. Kieslowski learned firsthand that censorship may ride on the coattails of exposure with "Blind Chance" (1981), which considered three possibilities for Poland's political future as it explored three different outcomes springing from the premise of a student trying to catch a train. "Blind Chance" was unable to include a fourth story in which Poland throws out the Communist Party entirely, and the remaining film, still quite impressive, was banned for over five years before finally being released in 1987.
While the outcome of one "Blind Chance" story was a blithely apolitical world (the student misses the train, and instead meets a sexy woman with whom he becomes involved), Kieslowski's subsequent "No End" (1984), while not forsaking wit entirely, nonetheless refused to be glibly satirical. The film's hero, a lawyer who represented many Poles oppressed by martial law, is dead at the film's opening.
Kieslowski's films always featured philosophical journeys into the human spirit and a concern for the moral and ethical implications of human action. Fittingly he confirmed his status as a major contemporary director with "Decalogue" (1988), an ambitious series of ten hour-long films funded by Polish TV, telling stories "based" on the Ten Commandments. (In "Decalogue 10", for instance, two brothers, an accountant and a punk rocker, both covet the stamp collection they have inherited from their father.) In the same year, Kieslowski expanded segments five and six into two features, "A Short Film About Killing" and "A Short Film About Love". Partially set, like the rest of the series, on a Warsaw housing estate, "A Short Film About Killing" is a grim and powerful tale drawing formal parallels between the act of murder and the workings of the criminal justice system.
Kieslowski ventured even closer to the realm of the human heart and soul and shifted further away from the political realities of contemporary Poland with his first international co-production, "The Double Life of Veronique" (1991). A more conventional art house item, the film, not surprisingly, gave his career greater international exposure than ever before as it strikingly and intensely paralleled the lives of two very similar women. With his acclaimed trilogy, "Blue" (1993), "White" (1994) and "Red" (1994), based on the tricolor themes of liberty, equality and fraternity, Kieslowski, proffering a densely plotted network of chance meetings and mutually destructive relationships, once again used the alienated female psyche as a vehicle for his recurrent social and metaphysical ruminations. Later in 1994, he announced his retirement from filmmaking. He suffered a heart attack in 1995 and died in March 1996 after undergoing bypass surgery.