This runs counter to nearly 60 years of documentary practice, disorienting the viewer profoundly. It’s this ambition that informs Marczak’s most remarkable gambit: relying on ADR to supply the majority of the film’s sound. The actual isn’t the endgame-it’s so much material for an ecstatic cinema. What he’s after isn’t necessarily what’s happening in the moment, but expressing what it feels like to be in the moment. Meanwhile, Marczak has moved beyond such questions before you even showed up to the party. You may get snagged on the line between fact and fiction, or whether these subjects might be more like actors, or whether all those sleepless nights are lived or devised. One night bleeds into another, scenes alternate with snapshots, but it all makes an impression. After a rough breakup with his college sweetheart, Krzysztof Baginski-the lithe dancer described earlier-moves into an apartment with his hunky friend Michal Huszcza, embarking on a hedonistic tour of house parties and group raves, flings and romances, foolishness and philosophical musings. There’s little plot to speak of, though that doesn’t mean what transpires is inconsequential. Even as it accumulates moments of beauty and happenstance-here a fortuitous coupling of rising smile and swooping camera, there an unfortunate clash between face and lamp post-the film reaches past the tangible to the intangible, beyond what’s seen and toward what’s felt. The camera moves with an expressiveness, as well as an invasiveness, that evokes Emmanuel Lubezki’s work with Terrence Malick-poetry not prose, gestures and glimpses of truth rather than the starkly raw or recognizably real. Sundance presented the film in its World Cinema Documentary competition, where Marczak took home the directing prize-a coup considering how little the film tries to convince the viewer of its factuality. ![]() Appropriate to its milieu of Millennial searchers drinking, drugging, dancing, and loving night after night, it’s a film that doesn’t ponder over or flaunt its freedoms-it just expects us to accommodate them. Yet what distinguished All These Sleepless Nights from even this group was how untroubled it seemed by its own unconventional choices. At Sundance, not traditionally a hotbed of nonfiction experimentation, All These Sleepless Nights was joined by form-busters such as Robert Greene’s ethical and stylistic dirty bomb Kate Plays Christine, Penny Lane’s shell-gaming Nuts!, Kirsten Johnson’s memoir-essay Cameraperson, and Pieter-Jan De Pue’s bracing allegory The Land of the Enlightened. If ever there was a ripe moment for a film this thoroughly unmoored (from genre, from expectation, from tripods, scripts, and storyboards), it’s now. Everything’s just hurtling forward, indefinitely and beautifully. The two boho Polish twentysomethings that Marczak trails throughout the film are in a state of active transition, and so is the film about them as it plays with the form of nonfiction. Nothing is fixed here, especially not the nature of the film and how you might make sense of it. ![]() By the time this sequence unfolds toward the end of All These Sleepless Nights-which premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival but had no distributor at press time-our questions over what’s observed, staged, or spontaneous in Michal Marczak’s audacious cinematic happening are overwhelmed by the fact and meaning of all that movement.
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