First, the aforementioned cinematography and editing lead to a dreamy capture of the scenes, with diegetic sounds blending with non-diegetic enhancements that make everything feel like a perfectly accurate view of the scene not through a camera and microphone, but through the mind's eye, with some distortion from alcohol and memory. I have never felt a film so accurately capture a state of mind that I've experienced, and I believe Marczak was able to do this largely through two creative choices. I'm a 21-year old college student (in the USA, not Warsaw), and watching this film felt like scrolling through the memories of my past couple years. And this is why the film was so stunning for me. And of course, the degree with which Marczak interfered with reality when shooting this film is quite uncertain (were the relationships real? Was the dialogue pre-written?), but that really doesn't matter, because he absolutely succeeded in capturing the reality of a 20ish- year old's mind. This is something I have never before experienced with a documentary - the cinematography is so fluid and characters so flawlessly apathetic to the presence of the camera that I was certain this was a strange scripted fiction. Above all else, All These Sleepless Nights overwhelms with its cinematographic and editing style - shot like an art-house blockbuster with 2.35 aspect ratio, 24fps flow, and a shallow depth-of-field, its stabilized shots lure you into that cinematic mode where you forget that you're watching a movie and begin to feel one with the characters. It follows primarily one (though at times, up to three) Polish 20-ish year olds (19-23 would be my guess) over the course of a year as they explore the night, usually at parties, music festivals, or wandering home through the streets - but the experience is captured so intimately that I did not realize I was watching a documentary until I read more about the film the day after seeing it (at Full Frame Film Festival). This film is a documentary, but unlike any I have seen before.
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