Mateusz Kudła


Mateusz Kudła is a Polish film producer, director and TV reporter.

Early life

Kudła was born on September 16, 1991 in Chicago, Illinois. His parents, Anna and Tomasz, moved the family back to Poland in 1992. He has dual citizenship, US and Polish.
Kudła's paternal great-grandparents, Jadwiga and Stanislaw Solecki were posthumously awarded the title of "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem on August 25, 2015. They risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jewish girl, Marlena Wagner, from extermination by the Nazis. In 2017 Mateusz Kudła started producing a documentary film about Marlena Madeleine Wagner-Alster, who came to Korczyna after over 70 years with her children and grandchildren to once again see the house where her life was saved.
Kudła studied American studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

Career

Kudła began his career in 2010 in TVN, one of Poland's major television networks owned by Discovery Inc. Earlier he had been the picture editor in Onet.pl, the largest Polish web portal. He prepares news reports for TVN24, a Polish 24-hour commercial news channel, and Fakty TVN, the flagship newscast of TVN. In 2018 he was a TV editor of International Festival of Independent Cinema Off Camera.
In 2016 Kudła was awarded the Green Pear for outstanding journalistic achievements, in 2017 he was nominated to Bolesław Prus award by The Association of Journalists of the Republic of Poland.
For his first short documentary film, Depositary, he was awarded on Southampton International Film Festival and has received two nominations on The Best Shorts Competition. His film The Photo Film People won the Gold Dolphin of the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards in France and the Gold Plaque of the Chicago International Film Festival Television Awards in United States.
In 2015 he directed documentary film Wilczur about Jacek Wilczur, member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland, explorer of the Project Riese undergrounds and the Home Army executioner in Holy Cross Mountains.
Kudła is director and producer of film Polanski, Horowitz. The Wizards from the Ghetto, with Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski's and New York photographer Ryszard Horowitz's participation, about their early life in Kraków Ghetto during the Holocaust and after the war in Poland.

Filmography

Director and producer
Film
Journalism