![]() I never set out to push boundaries.” Elsewhere he adds: “The characters are not pretending to be somebody they’re not. As Marczak puts it: “There are certain films that fit into certain categories very well and there are others that I don’t think need to be categorised, they’re just films and they either move you or they don’t, which is the case with this film. Trespassing traditional genre notions, it cannot be defined as either fiction or documentary. His subsequent feature fiction/non-fiction film Wszystkie nieprzespane noce (All These Sleepless Nights, 2016) follows two young art students wandering around Warsaw at night. Fuck For Forest won him the Best Documentary Award at Warsaw International Film Festival 2012 and the Sheffield Green Award – Special Mention at Sheffield International Documentary Festival 2013. Marczak’s next feature documentary film- perhaps indeed “another decisive step in what might be called collaborative direction” - documents Fuck for Forest, a Norwegian environmental group that produces pornography in order to raise money for the Amazon rainforest. Following six soldiers stationed at the frontier of northern Russia, it received the HBO Documentary Films Emerging Artist Award (Toronto), The Golden Pram at Zagreb Film Festival and the Silver Eye Award at Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, among others. Marczak studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw, film directing at the California Institute of the Arts, documentary directing at the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing in Warsaw, and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland.Īfter directing the short documentary Kobieta poszukiwana (A Woman Sought, 2009), which received an honorary mention at Koszalin Debut Film Festival, Marczak made his feature debut with the documentary Koniec Rosji (At the Edge of Russia, 2010). 1982 in Warsaw, Poland) is a film director and cinematographer. They were also determined to ensure that their film looked cinematic, not like grungy vérité footage shot on the hoof after closing time.Michał Marczak (b. They needed to show the same stamina and energy as their two young subjects. He and his technicians made sure their gear was lightweight and their cameras had enough battery life to shoot for hours at a time. Sometimes, we’d have a day off just to prepare all the gear,” Marczak recalls. “I was extremely strict about all the technical stuff. Marczak would shoot the young hedonists on the streets and rooftops or at their parties but he would then re-record their dialogue. Kris and Michal are art students who are performing as themselves for the filmmakers. There was never the attempt to hide the camera. All These Sleepless Nights blurs lines between what would normally be considered documentary and what is drama. There’s a something bizarre about the idea of a film crew following the two young men from party to party, filming them at raves and at their most intimate moments. Those younger people who are out on the streets all night, they somehow all know each other.” ![]() “For the first time in Poland, we have this completely free generation,” Marczak, in his mid-thirties himself, says of his twenty-something protagonists. The Warsaw of All These Sleepless Nights is certainly a much more alluring place than the grey, oppressive city shown in so many episodes of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog or in Andrzej Wajda films of the 1970s and 1980s. There’d be curfews, secret police and too much political weight to carry, and no one would have had the money or the time to devote themselves to such narcissistic enjoyment. When Poland was under martial law, he says, you wouldn’t find youngsters roaming from party to party, “taking over the streets and the clubs”. The film is also intended as a little slice of social history. These were key formative moments in their protagonists’ lives. ![]() ![]() Marczak and his crew followed the friends on their night-time for over a year, for “two summers and a winter”, as he puts it. “This has been happening in cinema for a long time,” he says. He adds that other directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Michael Winterbottom and Robert Flaherty have also combined documentary and dramatic techniques in the same way. ![]()
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