Politics & Power Quote by Krzysztof Kieslowski

It reads like tolerance, but it lands like an artist drawing a moral boundary around his own work. Kieslowski isn’t performing cosmopolitan virtue; he’s insisting, almost defensively, on the ordinary fact of being able to share space across borders. Coming from a Polish director who lived through the ideological claustrophobia of the Eastern Bloc, that plainness matters. Under systems that police contact, travel, and even imagination, “different nationalities” isn’t a lifestyle accessory. It’s a quiet rebuke to the idea that identity should be administered by the state.

The phrasing is telling: “no problem” is minimal, even dry. It implies there are people for whom it is, in fact, a problem; it also suggests he’s tired of having to reassure anyone. That exhaustion fits Kieslowski’s cinema, where ethical life is rarely grand and always compromised. His characters don’t deliver manifestos; they fumble toward decency in cramped apartments, committee offices, train stations. So the line works less as a celebration of diversity than as a refusal to let nationalism set the terms of intimacy, collaboration, or empathy.

Contextually, Kieslowski’s career tracks a widening aperture: from documentary scrutiny of Polish reality to fictions that test moral choice in multiple languages and cities (especially in The Double Life of Veronique and Three Colors). The quote signals that shift without romanticizing it. Nationality is real, but it’s not destiny. For a filmmaker obsessed with unseen connections and the accidents that bind strangers, that’s the whole point: borders are loud; conscience is quieter.