Barbara Sass
Barbara Sass-Zdort (1936–2015) was a Polish screenwriter and director, often called "the director of actresses" for her career-long focus on complex female protagonists. A 1975 graduate of the National Film School in Łódź, she worked as an assistant to Wojciech Has, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Andrzej Wajda before making her feature debut at the age of forty-two with Without Love (Bez miłości, 1980), a psychological drama starring Dorota Stalińska that won the FIPRESCI Prize at Mannheim and the Best Debut Director award at the Polish Film Festival in Gdańsk. Stalińska went on to lead two more of her films, Debutante (1981) and Scream (1982). Sass returned across the decades to portraits of women — debutantes and veterans alike — and was honoured with the Krzysztof Kieślowski Beyond Borders Award in 2012. She was married to the cinematographer Wiesław Zdort.