Zulawski laid to rest in Poland, Sophie Marceau among mourners

Polish art-house film director Andrzej Zulawski who succumbed to cancer last week at age 75 was laid to rest Monday, with French actress Sophie Marceau, his former spouse, among the mourners.

Family and friends attended the secular ceremony in which an urn containing Zulawski’s ashes was buried in a family tomb in Gora Kalwaria, a small town 30 kilometres (18 miles) south of the capital Warsaw.

“I hope we remember him for his freedom of expression, the freedom and courage to say and do what you really want to do in life,” his son and fellow director Xawery Zulawski told AFP ahead of the ceremony.

Born in occupied Poland in 1940, Zulawski left for Paris at the age of five with his parents and later studied cinema at renowned IDHEC French film school and politics at the Sorbonne.

He worked as the assistant to Oscar-winning Polish film legend Andrzej Wajda in the 1960s before embarking on his own career as a director in France where he was able to avoid the censors of communist Poland.

The director of several French films, he had just released his last work Cosmos in 2015, which won him the best director award at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland.

Zulawski’s work focused largely on nihilism, savage eroticism and hopelessness, which he attributed in a 2004 Paris Match interview to being born during World War II.

Now considered classics, films like “The Third Part of the Night” (1971) and “The Devil” (1972) were hailed as avant-garde when first released.

Zulawski is survived by three children, including a son with French actress and director Sophie Marceau. They separated in 2001.