Nina Niovilla
Polish silent film director
Antonina Elżbieta Petrykiewicz (born 1874, died 1966), better known as Nina Niovilla, was a Polish film director, screenwriter, actress, translator and a teacher. She was the first Polish female film director and the only female director of the silent film era in Poland.
Life
She was born in 1874 in Lwow as Antonina Elżbieta Petrykiewicz. During World War I she made a living as a singer and an actress in Warsaw and Berlin.
In 1906 she had a daughter Ludwika Janina born in Lwow.
Niovilla was the first Polish woman to direct a film and – at the same time – the only female film director of the silent film era in Poland. She debuted in 1918 in Berlin, where she directed the movie Die Heiratsannonce, under a pseudonym Nina von Petry. Her first Polish film was Tamara, also known as Obrońcy Lwowa (1919), which she directed after returning to Poland. With its use of the Battle of Lemberg as the background of the plot, Tamara had a patriotic theme, which was a popular motif in Polish filmmaking at the time. As with all the films that followed, Niovilla wrote the script herself.
“Nina Niovilla” enters the record as polish silent film director. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nina, Niovilla and Polish can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q100700029. VIAF identifies the subject as 163339676. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1874, 1966, 1906 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nina Niovilla” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.