Producer
Julia Nottingham
Producer
Lucas Ochoa
Producer
Marta Golba
Director
Michal Marczak
Producer
Thomas Benski
Doc Society Support
Production support
Film Details
Format: Feature length film
What does it mean to be truly awake in a world that seems satisfied to be asleep? Christopher and Michal push their experiences of life and love to breaking point as they restlessly roam the streets of Warsaw in search for answers.
Warsaw - like Berlin of the early 2000s - is now Europe’s emergent creative capital, teeming with en vogue twenty-somethings trying to discover their place in a city uncomfortably torn between its traumatic past and the bold future that always seems just out of reach. All These Sleepless Nights captures the essence of this transformative time from the perspective of a restless group of students, who, looking like they’re straight out of a Godard film, roam their city’s streets in search of what it means to be truly awake when everyone else seems satisfied to be asleep.
A painful breakup between one of these most sensitive students, Christopher, and his girlfriend sets events in motion. Christopher vows to pick up the pieces of his life by using his new-found freedom to the fullest. With his friend Michal as mentor and guide, Christopher experiences a saturnalia of a summer, falling in love again and learning more about himself in months than he has in years. Soon, however, Christopher starts to see the shortcomings of his friends, lovers, and entire social milieu. All These Sleepless Nights is a cinematically styled immersion into the heart and mind of this quiet hero who wants what he can’t have, but never stops wanting it nonetheless. It is a tribute to a generation awake enough to dream.
Subjects
Art & Culture
Awards & Festivals
Awards
Festival Screenings
Reviews
In some ways, All These Sleepless Nights feels like 100 minutes of waiting for something to happen: it's probably just as well that we get only a year's worth of Krzysiek's life, and then just a compilation of the briefest highlights.
"All These Sleepless Nights" raises this central question: Who would want to spend one minute, much less 105 minutes, with this guy? I did - and regret it.
For all its visual and sonic pleasures - see it in a theater with a good subwoofer - "All These Sleepless Nights" feels simple-minded in its commitment to drift above all else.
Taken as a whole, "All These Sleepless Nights" presents a restless, some-might-say-dynamic portrait of characters who seem to be going absolutely nowhere.
Michal Marczak's unclassifiable wonder is the movie that Terrence Malick was trying to manufacture with Song to Song.
The nagging question is whether or not the film stands tall on aesthetic or moral grounds, divorced of its purpose as a conversation piece.
An evocative snapshot of contemporary Polish twentysomethings that packs a universal poignancy.
The film is essentially a series of journal entries, but one which shows the ephemeral nature of youthful abandon and the value of the adage "a weekend wasted is never a weekend wasted".
The film brings impressive stylistic and thematic cohesion to its hedonistic haze, with fluid images, a trippy tone and a flavorful soup of sonic textures. But after a while it might make you feel like a sober person in a crowd of blissed-out stoners.
Throughout, what makes All These Sleepless Nights distinct, beyond the three protagonists philosophical, artistic musings and their charisma, is the camera's ability to convey the state of intoxication and the dreaminess of the nocturnal juvenilia.
Gallery
