A HUMAN STORY, TYPED ON A MACHINE

Maciej Kawecki

Lawyer · Educator · Poland

A doctor of law, president of the Lem Institute and vice-rector for innovation at WSB Merito University in Warsaw. Between 2017 and 2019 he coordinated Poland's GDPR rollout, having previously advised in the cabinet of the Minister of Digital Affairs. Today he is one of Poland's most recognisable communicators of technology: he explains artificial intelligence to people who do not write code, in a language where law, science and Lem's imagination meet.

Michał "OverJK" Owerczuk

Director · Founder · Poland

Polish film director, AI systems architect, and founder and artistic director of the Warsaw Glitch festival. A graduate of film directing, American studies and machine learning, and a former journalist and war correspondent, he brings nearly twenty years across film, television and games, including a feature documentary for Riot Games with over 3.1 million views. A multi-award-winning AI filmmaker, his films have screened twice at Cannes and won at festivals in Seoul, Bangkok, Los Angeles, New York and Portland. He is a board advisor and equity partner at Popcorn.co.

Krzysztof Zanussi

Director · Educator · Poland

A director, screenwriter, producer and actor, born in Warsaw in 1939, whose work belongs to two currents of Polish cinema: the cinema of Young Culture and the cinema of moral anxiety. He began by studying physics at the University of Warsaw, left it in 1959 for philosophy at the Jagiellonian University, left that in turn, and finally took directing at the Lodz Film School, graduating in 1966. Of his eight student shorts the most important was The Death of a Provincial, which won prizes at international festivals, among them the Golden Ducat at Mannheim.

He built a reputation as an intellectual working on morality, faith, evil and what it is to be human, with The Structure of Crystal (1969), Illumination (1972), Camouflage (1976), The Spiral (1978), The Constant Factor (1980) and Imperative (1982). He has shot in Poland and abroad, in West Germany, Italy and Russia. He took the Golden Lion in Venice for A Year of the Quiet Sun (1984) and the Grand Prix of the Polish Film Festival twice, for Camouflage and for Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease (2000). As a producer he stood behind other directors' films, among them Wojciech Marczewski's Weiser, Magdalena Piekorz's The Welts and Agnieszka Holland's Spoor.

A professor of film arts since 1992 and a Commander of the Order of Polonia Restituta, he has taught generations of directors that a camera is an instrument for thinking. At Warsaw Glitch he opens the festival with the keynote The Age of Transhumanism, stays for a conversation on the same stage and joins the Friday panel on a human story typed on a machine.