Leaving college and working as a theatrical tailor, Kieślowski applied to the Łódź Film School, which has Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda among its alumni.

Though he was not an overtly political filmmaker, he soon found that attempting to depict Polish life accurately brought him into conflict with the authorities.

After Workers '71, he turned his eye on the authorities themselves in Curriculum Vitae, a film that combined documentary footage of Politburo meetings with a fictional story about a man under scrutiny by the officials.

[9] Kieślowski later said that he abandoned documentary filmmaking due to two experiences: the censorship of Workers '71, which caused him to doubt whether truth could be told literally under an authoritarian regime, and an incident during the filming of Station (1981) in which some of his footage was nearly used as evidence in a criminal case.

Camera Buff (Amator, 1979) (which won the grand prize at the 11th Moscow International Film Festival)[12] and Blind Chance (Przypadek, 1981) continued along similar lines, but focused more on the ethical choices faced by a single character rather than a community.

During this period, Kieślowski was considered part of a loose movement with other Polish directors of the time, including Janusz Kijowski, Andrzej Wajda, and Agnieszka Holland, called the Cinema of moral anxiety.

His links with these directors, Holland in particular, caused concern within the Polish government, and each of his early films was subjected to censorship and enforced re-shooting/re-editing, if not banned outright.

Many of Preisner's pieces are referred to and discussed by the films' characters as being the work of the (fictional) Dutch composer "Van den Budenmayer".

Kieślowski's last four films, his most commercially successful, were foreign co-productions, made mainly with money from France and in particular from Romanian-born producer Marin Karmitz.

These focused on moral and metaphysical issues along lines similar to Dekalog and Blind Chance but on a more abstract level, with smaller casts, more internal stories, and less interest in communities.

After his death, the scripts were adapted and produced by three different directors: Heaven by Tom Tykwer in 2002;[18][19] Hell ("L'Enfer") by Danis Tanović in 2005;[20] and Purgatory in 2007.

His grave has a sculpture of the thumb and forefingers of two hands forming an oblong space; the classic view as if through a film camera.

[25] Kieślowski remains one of Europe's most influential directors, his works included in the study of film classes at universities throughout the world.

[26] Though he had claimed to be retiring after Three Colours, at the time of his death, Kieślowski was working on a new trilogy co-written with Piesiewicz, consisting of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory and inspired by Dante's The Divine Comedy.

The other two scripts existed only as thirty-page treatments at the time of Kieślowski's death; Piesiewicz has since completed these screenplays, with Hell, directed by Bosnian director Danis Tanović and starring Emmanuelle Béart, released in 2005.

[27] The 2007 film Nadzieja (Hope), directed by Ibo Kurdo and Stanislaw Mucha, also scripted by Piesiewicz, has been incorrectly identified as the third part of the trilogy, but is in fact, an unrelated project.

By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told.

[32] Since 2011, the Polish Contemporary Art Foundation In Situ has been organizing The Sokołowsko Film Festival: Hommage à Kieślowski.

Krzysztof Kieślowski earned numerous awards and nominations throughout his career, dating back to the Kraków Film Festival Golden Hobby-Horse in 1974.