Though perhaps low on insights, this is an evocative portrait of a brief, intense window of hedonism, self discovery and Olympic levels of self-indulgence experienced by young people on the cusp of adulthood. The director of Fuck For Forest creates an evocative portrait of a brief, intense window of hedonism for young friends in Warsaw In technique, if not the milieu, the film has some similarities to the approach employed by Roberto Minervini fo r Stop The Pounding Heart and The Other Side. Staged sequences and reality are so meshed together that it’s impossible to unpick which is which. Director Michal Marczak ( Fuck For Forest) cast the real-life characters, who play themselves, and then worked with them to develop a narrative for the film. This is the peak,” and we’d already figured out the angles, and the guys had already spoken with everybody, and we went in and did it.Inhabiting the blurred hinterland between documentary and fiction, this hypnotically aimless journey through a year and a bit in the lives of a pair of young friends in Warsaw defies neat categorisation. It was more, “We feel this is the one hour of the night. I knew that was going to be a big deal, so I didn’t want to deal with having hundreds of hours of footage. It’s more like a poetic connection between scenes, so you can move a lot of them around, because there’s not a super strong story connecting them. Then usually the atmosphere gets better and better and better, and when we feel like, “This is the time,” because the whole idea is that I didn’t want to bring back so much footage. Parties evolve, but you can anticipate: “Maybe there’s going to be something happening here.” Then maybe we move some stuff around just so it feels better in the frame. Then we go around a lot with the camera just to find the angles and see what works. We’re just in it, talking to everybody, explaining to some people who don’t know who we are, giving them a heads up. In the beginning everyone kind of talks and gets to know each other. These parties, they usually have their natural flow. Marczak: For me to find the rhythm of the scene, I really tried to be a part of the situation. MM: What were you doing leading up until the point when you would shoot at one of these parties? “Will we be able to jump into the same emotions? Where do we cut that night, and what do we join it with?” A lot of those things were gong through my mind, and we were openly talking about a lot of these things together. “Can we shoot all of this? Or do we split it into two nights?” That was mostly going through my head, seeing how it goes, and then assessing, “What’s the chance we’ll get the same setting again? Can I match this if we come back the next day? Will it fit? Is this super special?” Not only with the weather and the situations, but the emotions. We knew that we had an hour of great light. It was just a conversation about story: “What do we have from the scene? Where could it go? How could it develop? Are we shooting just one scene? Should we go onto the next scene? Which scene from the puzzle that I had outlined are we doing now?”Ī lot of it was trial and error. Once you’ve done something for so long, you don’t really focus on it. It’s just about story and responding to the light and to the moment. This is my rule: Once we’re getting in the mode of “This is the time that we might possibly shoot,” it’s just about story. But once we went out, that wasn’t a thing that we had to worry about. So we had a long downtime after every shoot, cleaning our equipment and getting it ready, recharging it for the next days shoot. That’s why we modified almost every piece of gear. Marczak: Because we put so much time in prep, the whole idea was that when we were on set, taking care of the equipment would be subconscious. Marczak maintains a novelistic feel in his direction, much as Terrence Malick’s recent film Song to Song does with its interweaving narratives-in which characters come and go, every interaction and relationship feels of tantamount importance, and people express themselves through the pulsing bass of house music. In the film, two art students, Krzysztof Baginski and Michal Huszcza, “play” themselves over the course of two summers in Warsaw. Going from party to party until there are no more parties, so you walk the empty streets in the early morning light, your best friend at your side, eventually ending up in a bed with all your clothes and the lights still on, only to wake up and do it all over again the next evening… Polish moviemaker Michal Marczak’s docufiction feature All These Sleepless Nights successfully examines these moments. The essential listlessness of youth: So many have tried to capture that on camera, though every film that does so successfully makes it feel like the first time.
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