Waves’ protagonists are Ania and Kasia – two seventeen-year-olds studying hairdressing in college and practising in a small hairdressing salon. They make friends with each other and start to spend time together, wandering around the city, smoking cigars and studying for an exam in wave hair styles. They struggle to find their place in the world and peace in their relationships with parents. Ania's mother, who was absent for the past few years, is trying to get in touch with her daughter.
The main protagonists are not actresses. The director met Katarzyna Kopeć (who plays Kasia in the film) at film workshops for youth conducted by him in a culture centre in Kraków. The girl – as he recalled – invited him into ‘her world’:
I had a chance to encounter her daily life, relationships at home, and the hairdressing salon where she practices and where she met her close friend Ania. Before Waves I directed Love, Love – a documentary about girls working in a hairdressing salon who showed me their world and their immediate surroundings. I thought it was worth creating a separate film for them, to see if locating their story in a fictional structure imposed by the director would bring anything interesting.
Zariczny, who had previously created documentaries – including the Sundance Film Festival 2013 Grand Prix for short films award winner The Whistle – wanted to use non-fiction elements in his first fiction film.
I had searched for a unique combination of those two forms to create a method of my own which I could use in my further films.
In a film about a world ‘which remains notoriously anonymous and uninteresting for all others’, the director pays attention to girls who need ‘to be understood’.
Kasia and Ania are settled into the world they know. I believe that narrating their story directly would be inhumane. This film is an attempt to examine this community. It is a synthesis of many stories. I only set them in motion. The girls enriched fictional characters with their own characteristics.