Director
Filip Gołdanowski (born October 11, 2008, in Warsaw) is a Polish composer, filmmaker and pianist. Despite his young age, he boasts an impressive output of several hundred compositions and significant artistic achievements, recognized also on the international stage. He embarked on his musical journey in 2015. For four years, he received formal education in piano performance, compositional techniques, music theory, and music history. Since 2020, he has been a self-taught composer, acquiring knowledge and skills through an ambitious self-education project. He is a scholar of the Polish Children's Fund. He continually refines his compositional craft by participating in masterclasses, workshops, and maintaining professional relationships with renowned creators. His mentors include distinguished composers such as Paweł Mykietyn, Gérard Pape, Moritz Eggert, and Ernst Helmut Flammer. In April 2025, he was admitted to the Youth Circle of the Polish Composers' Union and in June 2026, he become one of the members of international interdisciplinary artistic organisation C.L.S.I. - Cercle pour la Libération du Son et de l’Image. His compositions have been presented not only in Poland but also on stages across Europe: in Germany (Bayreuth and Rheinsberg), Italy (Valva), France (Paris), and Lithuania (Vilnius). As a pianist, he specializes in the performance of new music. He has given historic world premieres of works by, among others, Bogusław Schaeffer (Model XXIII for solo piano, Bydgoszcz 2024), as well as Aryan Omid and Gérard Pape (Paris 2025). In 2025, he became interested in the visual medium and began creating experimental films. He has directed more than 10 short films (Thou Art BENEDICTUS - a symphony for film, Introit, and his early work Preface) and one experimental feature-length film (In illo αTempore). For several years, he has been working on the interdisciplinary series REQUIEM - intended to be a collection of over 40 musical and film works. As the artist writes: "As early as 2017, I began to vaguely think about a Requiem. I have always been fascinated by multi-movement church music forms - both because of their spiritual significance and the diversity of their movements, which have evolved over the centuries. I have always strived to create a Requiem that would depart from the original structure of its movements. […] When I decided to create a new combination of sections - including both typical requiem sections and many sections from a medieval Mass - I found enough strength within myself to compose and complete a new Requiem, even though it was greater in form than initially planned. […] The work was composed primarily between 2019 and 2021 [...]. The current, official version of Requiem cycle remains faithful to the cycle’s original goals and broadens them vastly - it is not intended to present church forms, but rather to explore the form and intentions of a Mass while transcending its boundaries. This is not a conventional sacred oratorio that adheres to the generally accepted structure of movements and texts - it is a diverse, interdisciplinary work cycle that extensively explores the themes of spirituality, higher states of consciousness, and transcendence in the broadest sense of the word. [...] The films of Requiem also form a sub-cycle that brings them all together under the title The Requiem Films."
