Work on a film about the activity of Ignacy Łukasiewicz, the founder of the global oil industry is underway. The Nowy Styl Group is supporting the production of a motion picture to remind the achievements of a great inventor. The company was founded in the region, where Łukasiewicz used to work.
“Crude oil and its products are the central energy resources of the modern world. The man who first saw the potential of their practical use was a Pole named Ignacy Łukasiewicz,” writes Włodzimierz Bonusiak, the author of a book under the meaningful title The Sheikh of Galicia. Active in the second half of the 19th century, Ignacy Łukasiewicz, a pharmacist by education, was a co-creator of the method of refining kerosene from petroleum and the inventor of oil lamp (1853). A year later, he set up the first oil company to industrially extract and exploit oil at Bóbrka near Krosno, triggering an “oil fever” a few years before the Americans.
Unfortunately, the achievements of the great inventor were quickly forgotten. The memory of him came back to life for a moment in the 1930s, when his memorial was unveiled in Krosno. Today, Ignacy Łukasiewicz is little known outside the oil circles. Bogdan Miszczak, the owner of a Krosno TV station Obiektyw and the producer of a series of films about the history of the region, thought it was a shame. He decided to make a docudrama about Łukasiewicz. Shooting for the film has just been completed. “Ignacy Łukasiewicz is an outstanding figure: an oilman, a visionary, a patriot and a community activist. The amount of the material and the extensive scenes have convinced me to make an almost 90-minute film. It is directed by Maciej Wójcik, and the cast will include 12 professional actors, with Mariusz Bonaszewski as Ignacy” says Bogdan Miszczak, announcing the premiere of the film Łukasiewicz for February 2019.
The Nowy Styl Group is one of the sponsors of the film. Jerzy Krzanowski, a co-founder and Vice-President of the Group, says the company decided to engage in the production because of its and its owners’ close links with the area in which the “Galician Sheikh” worked. “Adam and I grew up in a city that, as one of the few, remembered Łukasiewicz's achievements. Outside the region, hardly anyone realizes that modern industry, including our sector, relies heavily on his achievements” he explains, recounting words spoken at the unveiling of the monument: “A man of such stature as Łukasiewicz would be celebrated a thousand times in a different country. His memory would last for centuries, and his contemporaries and descendants would boast having someone like him as a countryman.”
Łukasiewicz is Bogdan Miszczak’s second film production supported by the Nowy Styl Group. “Supporting local culture is an important part of our corporate social responsibility strategy,” says Jerzy Krzanowski.
(photos by TV Obiektyw)