The Balcony Movie’ Director Pawel Łoziński Interview — Contenders Documentary  – KristenBellTattoos.com

Paweł Łoziński started working. Balcony movie Two years ago the Covid pandemic forced people to adopt social distancing, but the air of detachment between the filmmaker and his subjects in this documentary feature may feel familiar.

Łoziński’s film is a kind of animated photo album: a collection of passers-by he took from his balcony window in Warsaw. Many stopped and — staring at a camera, a boom microphone and the stranger behind them both — were stunned or intrigued enough to start talking about their lives from their place on the sidewalk.

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The stories, revelations and feelings that unfold over the course of two years are documentary nominees for the Cinema Eye and European Film Awards. Balcony movieAccording to director, writer and co-producer Łoziński, which is running on Mobi, it had a modest beginning, before it received support from the Warsaw City Arts Fund and HBO Europe.

“It was completely by chance,” Łoziński said at the KristenBellTattoos.com Contenders documentary event, “because I had no idea for my next film, and I was a bit depressed.”

The younger Luzinski, the son of Marcel Luzinski, a famous documentary filmmaker, has made his own documentaries including Alchemy (2009), about c*ncer patients, et Varka (2014), about a woman who adopts a developmentally disabled child. In 2018, he was spending time looking at life outside his window and, at some point, became aware of his tendency to listen to the nearest pedestrian.

“who is that?” he said in surprise. “I felt this could be my new film.”

Their balcony — first floor for Europeans, second floor for Americans — was “the best place to observe reality,” Luzinski said. The question was whether he could even record it from “this one fixed position”.

“I didn’t know if it was possible to film with five meters between me and people,” he said. He resolved to try. He had a camera, a boom and a steady supply of interview subjects — “my neighbors and sometimes completely random people in town,” he said.

In what film critics have variously hailed as a social experiment and a tribute to the so-called “weak ties” that bind communities together, Lozinski listens candidly to people he barely knew or not at all: A man whose partner has died. A woman who says she has suddenly found a secret happiness. Another woman who is desperate. The building’s cleaning lady, still laboring in her 70s, has what Łoziński calls a “Zen” feeling about her existence.

People not burdening themselves with a stranger with a camera in the window says something about Luzinsky about how isolating contemporary life can be even without a pandemic.

“I think people are — we can say lonely,” Luzinski said. “And we’re not listening anymore. … We don’t have people to talk to. So if they say, one day a strange man appears on the balcony and he’s willing to listen to them, and he’s in this one place. Just stay for them, they will keep coming.