The Producers

Maciej Kubicki – Producer

A producer and graduate of the Wajda School, EAVE Producers Workshop, TorinoFilm Lab, MIDPOINT, DOK Incubator and Ex Oriente. A partner and board member of Telemark. A co-founder of the Producers Guild of Poland (PGP). A member of the Polish Film Academy (PAF), the European Film Academy (EFA)
and EMMY. He has produced documentary films (Pianoforte, dir. Jakub Piątek; The Wind. A Documentary Thriller, dir. Michał Bielawski; Over the Limit, dir. Marta Prus), features (A Night at the Kindergarten) and premium TV series (The Pact, In Treatment, The Stroke, Glitter,
Illegals). The winner of many awards for producers: International EMMY (2024, Pianoforte; 2021, Kubrick by Kubrick), the KIPA Award for Best Documentary Producer (2018, Over the Limit), the Best Producer Award at the Docs Against Gravity Festival (2023, Pianoforte) and the Best Producer Award at the Krakow Film Festival (2018, Over the Limit)..

Piotr Smiecowski – Producer

A producer and production manager who graduated in the Film and TV Production Organisation from the Film School in Łódź. Between 2018 and 2020, he worked on numerous short films as well as other audiovisual projects (music videos, commercials, PSA ads, and a TV series). Since 2020, he's been working for Telemark on the feature Film for
Aliens (dir. Piotr Stasik), premium drama series such as High Water (dir. Jan Holoubek), Project UFO (dir. Kasper Bajon) and Heweliusz (dir. Jan Holoubek). As an executive producer, he worked on the award-winning short film A Cappella (Gorzko, dir. Marcin Kluczykowski). He's the producer of the documentary feature film - December. Currently, he's developing new projects for Telemark.

Grzegorz Paprzycki – Director

Director, screenwriter, director of photography. Graduated from the Film and Television Directing Department at the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School in Katowice in 2019 and the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań in 2007. Won more than thirty awards and honorary mentions at Polish and foreign film festivals, including the award for for the Best Short Documentary in the International Competition at the 2020 It’s All True International Documentary Film Festival in São
Paulo and the Golden Hobby-Horse for Best Polish Film at the 2019 Krakow Film Festival. His short film My Country, So Beautiful was long listed for the American Academy Awards.
His latest film – December was selected for the First Feature Competition on Sheffield DocFest

Making The Film

Director's Statement

As a director, I want to express myself on topics that are important to me, that evoke emotions and spark creativity. I want to make socially valuable films that, I hope, will encourage some viewers to reflect on our reality. In addition, I try to approach filmmaking individually and tell familiar stories in a formally different way, trying to create my own style. This is what my feature-length documentary debut, December, strives to be. Firstly, it touches on the timely topic of the migrant crisis, which is important to me, but also to society, and which (unfortunately) is presented in a one-sided manner by the media. The facts are ignored: violations of international law, violence by uniformed services, pushbacks, the lack of legal and official humanitarian aid, the deaths of dozens of migrants on the Polish side. Instead, reality is simplified by feeding the public with selective information about the ‘hybrid war’, pathologies on the part of migrants, or attempts to cross the border illegally. This biased and dangerous media narrative is one of the motivations for this project. Describing people as ‘weapons’ and legally allowing them to suffer and die could not leave me indifferent. It is obvious that reality is not black and white, including the reality on the Polish-Belarusian border, but I consider the value of life and helping others to be superior to any form of ‘nationalism’. Secondly, the film is a formally unique narrative. While there are quite a few films that address the migrant crisis, December is an attempt to approach the issue in an unconventional way. The film portrays the month of December, focusing on the most dramatic moments of this period while touching on the topic of the migrant crisis, which, in December, contrasts sharply with the idea of Christian holidays and helping others, so deeply rooted in Poland. Thirty-one mini-stories refer to the thirty-one days of the month and create a narrative without a single protagonist, apart from the title character, December.
‘- Grzegorz Paprzycki, Director, December