Personnel

^director Krzysztof Kieślowski
^screenplay Krzysztof Kieślowski
^{director of photography} Witold Stok
^music Michał Żarnecki
^with Juliusz Machulski, Irena Lorentowicz, Włodzimierz Boruński, Michał Tarkowski, Andrzej Siedlecki, Tomasz Lengren, Tomasz Zygadło
^awards
 Great Award of the City of Mannheim and International Catholic Film Award at Mannheim International Film Week, 1976
 Grand Prix and Journalists Prize in the category ‘Best Television Films’ at the 3rd Polish Film Festival in Gdańsk, 1976
 Grand Prix, Golden Grape, at the Lubuskie Film Summer in Łagów, 1979
 Grand Prix, Great Jantar at International Young People’s Film Meetings ‘Youth on the Screen’ in Koszalin, 1976
 prize awarded by the Polish Association of Film Critics Club, the Don Quixote, 1976
 the Andrzej Munk prize, 1975
 Golden Duck, ‘Film’ magazine award in the category of ‘Direction Debut in a Feature Film’ for Marek Kondrat, 1976

KRZYSZTOF KIEŚLOWSKI, ABOUT MYSELF [O SOBIE]. OPRACOWANIE – DANUTA STOK, KRAKÓW 1997

I worked for a year or so in a theatre. I was a wardrobe master. At that time it was the best theatre in Warsaw. (…) A wardrobe master may fold napkins and keep the place tidy or he may go backstage and look at the performance. I chose to look. The screenplay of ‘Personnel’ resembled more or less a film. (…) The plot was (…) very delicate and rather enigmatic. A young man comes to an opera to work as a tailor and realizes that his image of theatre and art is quite naive. He turns out to be quite helpless with these dreams of his in confrontation with artists – people who rule the art world, who make art every day. The world which seemed so beautiful, so lofty, does not exist in practice. (…) There are arguments, tiffs, clashes of ambition, bargaining, screaming. Art as such vanishes. You find it when a performance starts. The audience goes quiet, the curtain is drawn, and you experience something more spiritual. (…) Theatre and opera are always a metaphor of life. Of course, the message was that we cannot find a place of our own in Poland, that our dreams of an ideal reality keep crashing into something very shallow and miserable.