Remembering Marian Marzyński (1937-2023)

April 6, 2023

David Fanning

David Fanning is the founder of FRONTLINE and served as executive producer from 1983 to 2015.

FRONTLINE has lost one of its great filmmakers. We worked closely with Marian Marzyński for close to four decades, during which time he made some of the most memorable films in the series’ history.

His first film for us was Return to Poland (1982), which was part of World, an international documentary series that was the progenitor to FRONTLINE. Marian persuaded me to give him a small shooting budget to take his film-student cameraman back to Poland. He just wanted money to cover the film stock and the processing costs. He promised to tell the story of how, as a five-year-old, he was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto by his mother, who had to leave him to survive the war on his own.

I wasn’t sure what we were going to get but was so persuaded by seeing a few rolls of uncut footage that we gave him the rest of the budget to edit and finish what turned out to be a remarkable film. And so began a relationship we all enjoyed immensely for so many years. Marian had great skills as a director, and his big-hearted, passionate belief in his work was infectious. When FRONTLINE was launched in 1983, Marian began making a series of films for us, including Welcome to America (1984), Russia: Love it or Leave It (1986), My Retirement Dreams (1988), Betting on the Lottery (1990) and After Gorbachev’s USSR (1992).

For all his range, it was Marian’s personal history that he would return to years later in Never Forget to Lie (2013), and it would inform so many of the moving films he made for FRONTLINE, like A Jew Among the Germans (2005) and his magnum opus, Shtetl (1996).

Shtetl is a three-hour narrative that starts with Marian’s journey to a village in Poland with a Jewish American friend whose family had escaped the German occupation. The Germans would send 2,000 Jews from the village to the Treblinka extermination camp. Marian follows a trail that reveals the historic antisemitism among the Polish inhabitants towards their Jewish neighbors, and the prejudice that had persisted among the townspeople. It’s a journey full of surprises and memorable characters filmed as a traveling road movie with Marian at its center — a powerful accounting of the Holocaust, told with no archival footage, just people struggling with memory’s record.

Marian was an enormously prolific filmmaker, mining his own family history and his personal life to produce inventive, sometimes quirky, but always revelatory works. He was a great mentor to younger filmmakers, finding promising candidates and throwing them into the rolling, energetic experience of Marian World. He would appear in my doorway with another idea, another work-in-progress, that — regardless of whether our budgets were all committed or we were just over-subscribed — could somehow be strung together by sheer enthusiasm. We will miss his hugs, his intelligence, his wisdom and his embrace of life.