To me, this beauty and perfection renders irrelevant any need for categorization as fiction or non-fiction. But again, this doubt comes from my own marveling at the beauty and narrative perfection of the captured moments. I’m still unclear on how much of the film is “directed” or “devised,” or in how many of the scenes the director might have arranged something ahead of time for the benefit of the story. I, on the other hand, desperately tried to slump into invisibility as he demanded to know how this film could be called a documentary, so I didn’t quite catch all the details of Marczak’s explanation about how he followed Krzysztof and Michał around for a year, going to all-night parties with them, and that the film does indeed capture the reality of their lives. How could a filmmaker possibly achieve them on the fly?Īfter the film, Marczak and his two subjects came out on the stage, and before the moderator had even opened up the floor to questions, my colleague leapt out of his seat with his hand up in the air like that kid in school whom no one could stand. These are the trappings of scripted fiction. Even more, the camerawork is nothing but gorgeous and graceful (Marczak fashioned his own gyroscopic camera rig), the scenes between the two central friends and their familiars are disarmingly intimate, and there is such a felicity with the chance moments of real life and the subjects’ profound commentary about them that one feels these aspects could have only been planned and constructed, not simply caught. Admittedly, Marczak’s film pushes the boundaries of what we expect from a documentary: there are no talking heads or interviews, there is no stated issue or topic, there is no information. I realized that Marczak had indeed captured what I remembered as the feeling of being 20: the dreamy, exciting rush of waking up to the world, forging friendships, discovering love and heartbreak, talking late into the night about art and ideas, and often making my way home against a lightening dawn sky while the rest of the world was just rousing from slumber.Īn hour and a half later, as the film’s credits rolled, my blissful state was shattered by a filmmaker colleague seated next to me: “That is not a documentary!” He was apoplectic with rage that this beautiful cinematic experience didn’t conform to his expectations of what a documentary should be, or rather, what tools a documentary is allowed to employ. While the film ostensibly chronicles the all-night partying life of two Warsaw twentysomethings, Krzysztof Baginski and Michał Huszcza, as they dance, drink, and trip their way through summer nights, falling in and out of love with girlfriends, and testing the bounds of friendship, the cinematic experience is something much more profound.Īll These Sleepless Nights begins with an epigraph that defines the psychological term “reminiscence bump”: “The tendency for our minds to hold on to a greater number of memories from adolescence and early adulthood than any other period of our lives.”And about 15 minutes into the film, I was suddenly overcome with my own reminiscence bump. I first saw Michał Marczak’s All These Sleepless Nights in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
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