Anna Mydlarska is a filmmaker, archivist, translator, and academic teacher. From the beginning of the 1980s she cooperated with "Solidarity": she was Lech Wales’s interpreter during the interviews with foreign journalists. She was also the worker of the National Commission of Solidarity and Solidarity’s Bulletin in Gdansk, where she regularly translated foreign press articles. Apart from that, she translated illegal foreign literature for the underground publications.
She has been the head of the Department of Film Documentation in European Solidarity Centre (ECS) in Gdansk since the institution’s creation in 2008. She has been overlooking the content and organisation of “Mediateka”: a media library which archives original video and voice recordings from the 1970s and 1980s. Mydlarska also leads ECS’s Film Notations, which is her authorial project, based on the interviews with Solidarity’s activists and leaders of political and cultural opposition.
Her life mission is to preserve the memory of the democratic movement and the people of political and cultural opposition in socialist Poland. She acts as a film director, producer and screenwriter – not only in the project of Notations, but also in numerous documentary films. In 1996 she was awarded the so-called “Polish Pulitzer” (the Main Award of Polish Journalist Association) for her documentary “The Dawn of Emigration – Conversations in Paris” (pl. “Zmierzch emigracji – rozmowy paryskie”). In 2006 she received the “Merited for Polish Culture” medal.
She is a wife of Jacek Mydlarski, a painter associated with Polish cultural opposition scene of 1980s.
