#All these sleepless nights imdb movie#

Those were films I saw when I was 15, and I couldn’t really read up on how the films were made, so I had to come up with my own story.

I try to trace it back, maybe to Wayne Wang and Paul Auster in Smoke and Blue in the Face. That was what drew me, from the very beginning. Is that a new approach for you, or did your other films anticipate this kind of style, as well? Are they equally as hybrid as All These Sleepless Nights? In this film, we definitely feel your hand as the director, particularly in your camera work. So, I haven’t seen either of your two other features, I confess. Those are universal things, and definitely the stuff that I wanted to concentrate on. That having been said, the things that the characters are going through are completely universal: the quest to see who you actually are experimenting with different versions of yourself making mistakes and having epiphanies and coming up with things about yourself that have been discovered hundreds of times before in every generation. What I meant is that, from the perspective of a documentary, and the Polish people, it does really capture those situations and people, although some of the details in their life have been changed, even if, overall, the bigger picture fits. Do you see it as speaking to something beyond the Polish experience? It’s not uniquely Polish, in some places, though in others it certainly is.

We have the specificity of Warsaw, but it could almost be anywhere, in terms of that post-college, twentysomething angst. As much as your film is clearly grounded in Polish life, it still feels very universal. It’s interesting that you talk about how people in Warsaw have come up to you and said that your film represents what they experienced. I was just curious how you thought of your film. HtN : Well, we’re in an age of hybridity, as far as documentaries go, so I’m not, myself, pushing for a definition. This film was supposed to appeal more to the heart than to the brain. How do you express emotions or beautiful things like physical love? How do you put them in a documentary? You can have the characters tell it to the other characters, but it doesn’t make you really feel it. And I feel that I did a good job capturing what I was noticing and seeing around that time and turning it into a cinematic language. Many, many people have told me that that is exactly how their life is, in Warsaw. I think it really has to come down to what is your definition of a documentary the philosophical concept behind it. It was a conscious choice to have it premiere in the documentary competition at Sundance and start its life there, because I think the film is very much tethered to reality and to me it is definitely a documentary about the emotions of youth and what it means to be young. I think that some films are easy to label, and it’s good to label them, and I think some…you know, honestly, I can’t answer that question. Michal Marczak: I like that there is no clear genre designation, and would like to keep it that way. If go to IMDb right now and look up your film, there is no clear genre designation. Hammer to Nail : When I saw your film last year for its Sundance release, it was pitched as a documentary, and in fact it won a Directing Award for World Cinema Documentary at that festival. Here is a condensed digest of our conversation, edited for clarity. I did not re-watch it before our conversation, but remember being simultaneously entranced by its mise-en-scène and disappointed by some parts of its content (what is new in feeling lost after graduation?).

#All these sleepless nights imdb movie#

Neither entirely fiction nor nonfiction, the movie is part of a new wave of films that defy genre classification. A beautifully shot, elliptical meditation on post-college malaise, the film uses ostensible non-actors (we learn more about this in the interview, below) playing mostly true versions of themselves. I recently spoke by phone with Polish filmmaker Michal Marczak on the occasion of the recent theatrical release of his 2016 Sundance-winning documentary hybrid feature All These Sleepless Nights ( which I reviewed last year).