lit a candle 1h ago78 is no age at all these days. Only came across Bar przy placu a few years back through a subtitled upload, stayed with me since. Thinking of her son Paweł and her sister Ewa tonight.
Their story
Danuta Beata Postnikoff, known professionally as Beata Postnikoff, was a Polish journalist, documentary film director and screenwriter whose films over three decades looked closely at social questions and ordinary lives in Poland. She also directed for television and the stage, and was one of the people behind the revival of…
Danuta Beata Postnikoff, known professionally as Beata Postnikoff, was a Polish journalist, documentary film director and screenwriter whose films over three decades looked closely at social questions and ordinary lives in Poland. She also directed for television and the stage, and was one of the people behind the revival of Warsaw's Teatr Hybrydy. She died on 6 November 2026, aged 78.
She was born in Sopot on 13 May 1948, the daughter of Paweł Postnikoff, a master mariner and a major in the wartime Home Army who came from a Polonised family of Russian gentry, and of Zenobia, née Potocka. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1967 and 1968, graduated from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw in 1972, and completed her studies at the National Film School in Łódź in 1978.
Her first credited film, Nocny etat, appeared in 1977, and she went on to write and direct a long run of documentary and short films. Among them were Czy tak? and Maraton (1983), Być kobietą (1985), Tylko dla odważnych (1987) and Bar przy placu (1988), which won the Syrenka Warszawska award of the Film Critics Club and a Bronze Lajkonik at the Kraków short film festival in 1989, as well as a third prize at the Łódź festival of social and political films.
In the 1990s she made Kosmopolak, Głos Ameryki, Polski Panteon, Radio watykańskie and Polski taniec, and her film Cienie przyjaźni received a special award at the Golden Knight festival of Slavic and Orthodox nations in 1998. Later work included Trzy miłości (2003), Bez miejscówki (2005), Kres podróży (2007) and Urszula Dudziak. Życie jest piękne (2008), a portrait of the jazz singer. She also worked with the weekly Polityka, and at Teatr Hybrydy she directed Pastorałki Nasze Codzienne, recorded for TVP and TV Polonia, and Śpiewogra wielkanocna, released on CD. In the 2019 parliamentary election she stood for the Sejm on the Democratic Left Alliance list in Warsaw.
Postnikoff lived in Warsaw. She was the sister of the television and film director Ewa Cendrowska and the mother of the journalist Paweł Moskalewicz. Her family's death notice remembered her as a sociologist, a director of fine documentaries, reportage and television and theatre productions, an empathetic journalist, and a poet who wrote moving carols and many poems. A funeral Mass was held on 13 November 2026 at the Church of Creative Communities on Plac Teatralny in Warsaw, followed by a farewell at the Powązki Military Cemetery funeral home and burial in the family grave.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), FilmPolski.pl and Gazeta Wyborcza death notice. Wikipedia ↗
Photos
1Beata Postnikoff in 2005
by People Forever
Didn't know that film had subtitles out there, glad it travelled.