My Nikifor
Filmfest 2006

The Polish spa of Krynica in 1960. Uninvited, Nikifor enters Marian Wlosiski’s studio and unceremoniously unpacks his painter’s tools of trade. He has come to stay. Irritated at first, Marian takes him in and ends up caring for him until the day of the tubercular painter’s great triumph. Nikifor (1895-1968) was an illiterate street painter who won acclaim equal to that of Poland’s most outstanding Polish artists. He plied his trade in the most unfavorable conditions: spending most of his life in stark poverty, in dire need of food, often without a roof overhead, all alone, and misunderstood. Yet today, large museums and art collectors all over the world boast his pictures and his watercolors go for incredibly high prices at art auctions.