Małgorzata Szumowska is the third Polish filmmaker to win the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 1994, Krzysztof Kieślowski was recognised for his work as a director on Biały, while in 2010 Roman Polański received the award for his feature Ghostwriter. The screenplay for BODY/CIAŁO, a film co-financed by the Polish Film Institute, was written by Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert, who also lensed the film. The film stars Janusz Gajos, Justyna Suwała and Maja Ostaszewska, with supporting performanes by Tomasz Ziętek, Ewa Dałkowska, Adam Woronowicz, and Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik. Set in present-day Poland, BODY/CIAŁO is the story of three individuals - a prosecutor (Janusz Gajos), his anorectic teenage daughter (Justyna Suwała), and their therapist (Maja Ostaszewska), a woman with paranormal abilities. "The script [took a long time to develop]. We started at the beginning with the idea of making a movie about anorectic girls, but pretty fast we rejected the idea of doing a movie only about anorexia. We found it too hermetic somehow. Too brutal, too violent in a way, [...] to present that kind of closed world [...] might not be understandable for the audience. That's why we started to think about [the] body as a subject of the movie and the different relation[s] to the human body. [The] first idea was an anorectic girl, who turned, in the end, in the movie, into a bulimic [...] The father, who has contact with dead bodies - it's a kind of physical touch of death, I would say. And a woman who is searching for an 'astro,' the ghost, and doesn't care about her physical body somehow. It's like three aspects of [the] body," said Małgorzata Szumowska at the press conference.
