In the west, young people have had freedom for decades, more or less, but in Poland, it was something very new. It was strange because in the stories I’ve had going through my mind, I never thought I would do a coming-of-age movie. How did this crazy idea come about for you? Recently in Los Angeles, Marczak spoke about how he was inspired to take a look at the generation just behind his during a unique moment in Polish history, as well as his ongoing collaboration with editor Dorota Wardeszkiewicz, a former associate of Krzysztof Kieslowski, and how he captured such poetic visuals on the fly. But in “All These Sleepless Nights,” it’s especially effective with sweeping camera moves that reflect a notion that the world revolves around them and the sense that this moment is fleeting, tying time and space together in way that feels truer in spirit to these formative years than any fly on the wall treatment could be. In previous films “At the Edge of Russia” and “Fuck for Forest,” the director’s immersive style has been insightful for protagonists discovering their own limits ideologically, physically and psychologically, whether it’s on the border where Russia meets Finland where a young soldier learns the ropes of his patrol in the former or in Norway where a radical nonprofit makes porn to benefit the environment in the latter. Marczak earned the best director prize for World Cinema Documentary at Sundance last year for “All These Sleepless Nights,” a culmination of his ongoing push to capture his subjects with uncommon intimacy, whether or not what unfolds before his camera is strictly nonfiction. Yet simultaneously there’s an unmistakable authenticity emanating from Krzysztof and his roommate Michal (Michal Huszcza) as they drift from party to party, occasionally encountering the profound as they stumble through some typical youthful transgressions, particularly when they come to be infatuated by the same woman (Eva Lebuef). For the filmmaker, it acts as a sly reference to the way in which he decided to capture the moment, an inventive blend of narrative techniques and nonfiction elements that recreates the dreamy feeling that one is the star of their own movie in their early twenties with the world at their fingertips. Even in high budget films I feel like the crowd in the background is fake and they aren’t dancing to the actual music, or people are pretending to be drunk, so I really wanted that authenticity of Warsaw and I knew I couldn’t do anything that would distract or interfere with the mode and atmosphere I wanted to capture.“Sometimes things seem fake, sometimes they don’t,” a young woman tells Krzysztof (Krzysztof Baginski) late one evening in “All These Sleepless Nights,” a line that crystallizes Michal Marczak’s brilliant snapshot of being young and carefree in Warsaw. When I knew I wanted to do this I knew there wasn’t enough really good young actors that had that new vibe to them, or that represented the style of how I wanted to tell the story, so I knew I would have to work with non-actors or people off the streets, because that’s where the energy is. That was the idea of the structure of the film was to make a movie of moments where the audience has to connect the dots. All those crazy and random things that happened, I’m only now making sense of it. That’s how I felt when I got into my 30s. I really wanted to make a film about youth and all those crazy emotions associated with it and the fragmentary nature of it and how once you are past that period in your life you have to look back and make your own narrative about it.
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