Wójcik, Wojciech

(Jerzy Wojciech Wójcik, 1943-).

   Director and scriptwriter specializing in crime films. After graduating in 1967 from the Łódź Film School, Wójcik worked for several years as assistant to the director or second director on seventeen films beginning with Kazimierz Kutz's Robbery (1967/1969) and including Salt of the Black Earth (1970, Kutz), The Wicked Gate (1974, Stanisław Różewicz), and Death of a President (1977, Jerzy Kawalerowicz). Although at the beginning of his directorial career he made a psychological drama, Window (Okno, 1981/1983), and a postwar drama, Alone among His Own (Sam pośród swoich, 1985), his action film Karate Polish Style (Karate po polsku, 1983) set the pattern for his later works. They were mostly action-oriented crime films that incorporated the style of American cinema to describe unglamorous Polish reality. In Private Investigation (Prywatne śledztwo, 1987), Roman Wilhelmi played a character seeking revenge after his family was killed by a drunken truck driver. It was followed by a crime comedy, To Kill at the End (Zabić na końcu, 1990), and a psychological crime drama, Three Days without Conviction (Trzy dni bez wyroku, 1991). Wojcik's most popular film was the television crime series The Extradition (Ekstradycja, 1995-1996, 1998), with Marek Kondrat starring as a stereotypi-cally hard-bitten Warsaw police inspector named Olgierd Halski who fights international drug gangs. Apart from other crime films, such as Bermuda Triangle (Trójkąt Bermudzki, 1988) and The Last Mission (Ostatnia misja, 2000), Wójcik also directed a political drama set in the 1960s, There and Back (Tam i z powrotem, 2002). The film, winning Wójcik Best Director at the Festival of Polish Films, tells the story of a Polish physician (Janusz Gajos) who uses desperate measures to be reunited with his English wife and daughter.

   Other films: No Mercy (Bez litości, 2002), The Pack (Sfora, TV series, 2002), The Forgerers: Return of the Pack (Fałszerze. Powrót sfory, TV series, 2006).

   Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema by Marek Haltof