Zuzanna Grajcewicz

Director and screenwriter, born in 1994, currently based in Warsaw. A graduate of Film Directing at the Lodz Film School and Film and Theatre Theory Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. In 2020 she was awarded the prestigious “Young Poland” Scholarship, granted by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Her short films have been screened at dozens of festivals in Poland and abroad, including DC Shorts International Film Festival, the 36th International Short Film Festival Interfilm in Berlin, Brooklyn Film Festival, Bogotá Short Film Festival, Rome Independent Film Festival and the Warsaw Film Festival. In 2018, her short film Wycinka received a Special Mention at the 18th New Horizons International Film Festival. In 2021, she was awarded the Golden Jantar for Best Short Fiction Film for Dog Days and received the Second Prize at the 16th BNP Paribas Two Riversides Film and Art Festival for Venus of Willendorf. She has gained extensive on-set experience, working as an assistant director, crowd scenes director, and 1 AD on various productions, including the six-episode Netflix TV series The Mothers of Penguins (2024). She is currently developing her feature-length debut films: fiction I have an idea for a film and documentary Letters to yourself, and working on original series projects. Her work often begins with a simple conceptual shift, creating slightly altered realities that expose and question social norms. Zuzanna is interested in characters navigating systems that shape identity and behaviour whether adapting to them, resisting them, or trying to redefine their place within them. She develops stories where the visual concept is inseparable from the narrative, often with a subtle sense of irony.

The project

Will I See the Dolphins This Time?

When I first travelled to Formentera, I was completely in love, and the person I was with kept pretending that she could see dolphins in the sea. I believed her every time, even though I couldn’t see any. It felt as if that high season of love, intensity and constant movement could go on indefinitely.

Now I return to the island at a different moment in time, at the moment when I am alone,  experiencing how life quietly moves forward, reshaping relationships, priorities and emotions. For me, off-season has become a metaphor for this stage of life, a time when the intensity of celebration fades, but real presence begins. A period less defined by events, and more by stillness, distance and attention.

Will I See the Dolphins This Time? is a short poetic documentary project that will be developed during this return. Through sound, sensory observation and the search for traces of a previous presence, I will confront memory with the present moment. The recurring question about dolphins becomes a metaphor for perception, for the fragile boundary between illusion and presence, and for the ways we construct meaning out of absence. While rooted in a specific experience, the film reflects more broadly on cycles of intensity and withdrawal, and on the quieter periods in which perception sharpens and new forms of attention emerge.