The Festival dei Popoli will celebrate 50 years of punk with a tribute to Lech Kowalski, the documentary filmmaker who, more than anyone else, has captured on film the fiery trajectory of this historic generational movement. The director will be a guest in Florence for the 67th edition of the international documentary film festival, which will take place from 31 October to 8 November 2026.
The tribute to Kowalski forms part of ‘Let the Music Play’, the festival section dedicated to documentary films exploring music and its key figures. It is a comprehensive focus on a musical genre that continues to inspire and guide countercultures, and whose origins are conventionally dated to 1976, the year of the Ramones’ debut album: since then, the music world and society have been unable to ignore the urgency of a generation to make its voice heard, through lyrics and razor-sharp guitars that propelled rock rhythms to breakneck speeds, a rejection of the established order and iconoclasm, and lives lived to the extreme. The programme features Lech Kowalski’s ‘punk trilogy’, comprising D.O.A. – A Rite of Passage (1981), Born to Lose – The Last Rock’n’Roll Movie (1999) and Hey Is Dee Dee Home? (2002), alongside the masterful biographical film East of Paradise (2005): the director, who will be in attendance for all the screenings in his honour, will also hold a masterclass open to the public.
“The 67th edition of the Festival dei Popoli will give us the opportunity to mark a number of anniversaries. Among these is the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of punk. Within the programme, the section dedicated to music documentaries has always stood out for the originality of its selections, and in November we will be welcoming to Florence one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of the last half-century. From the late 1970s to the present day, Lech Kowalski has filmed the clash between cultures and generations, the gulf separating ideals from failures, social divisions and their repercussions on people’s lives, revealing a world marked by injustice and violence, as well as a profound sense of vindication amongst exiles, fighters and the defeated. His punk trilogy, accompanied by the indispensable film of a lifetime, is a dazzling account of an era teetering on the brink of an abyss, realised with a style and approach unique in the history of cinema.” (Alessandro Stellino, Artistic Director of Festival dei Popoli)
The Filmmaker
A stateless filmmaker and a rebel by nature, Kowalski has always had a keen eye for social dynamics and the mechanisms of oppression, creating independent, first-person cinema in which the director’s gaze, body and voice become instruments of acceptance and solidarity towards the lives of others. Born in London in 1951 to Polish parents, Lech Kowalski moved to New York in the 1970s, where he attended the School of Visual Arts as a student of Vito Acconci, finding a metropolis teeming with energy and conflict. After a brief foray into the world of adult films (the 1977 film Sex Stars, now lost), he chronicled the punk explosion like no other, highlighting the subversive energy and self-destructive tendencies inherent in the phenomenon.
