Piotr Stasik

Piotr Stasik is a documentary film-maker and an animator of cultural activities. He was born on 23rd September 1976.

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Piotr Stasik

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Piotr Stasik, photo: private archives

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He has received awards at festivals in Wiesbaden and Perm for the short film Koniec Lata (The Last Day of Summer). At the Camerimage Festival, he was bestowed with the Golden Frog. Another of his films, Diary of a Journey has been rewarded in Kiev, Kraków and Łagów. Piotr Stasik lives a life of travel – between countries, continents and different projects. With equal curiosity, he looks at the students of a Russian cadet school, the Polish inhabitants of the provinces and New Yorkers met on the subway. As he said in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza conducted by Tadeusz Sobolewski:

I like to be on the go. It is easier for me to meet people this way. Being a stranger, I can ask whatever I want and can penetrate the inner life of places and people. In Burma, New York or New Zealand, I quickly get inside. And when I come back to Poland, it is easier for me to talk, it's easier for me to bear Poland.

Stasik's path to becoming a film director does not resemble the classic film biography. He was born in a village near Sieradz, 200km from Warsaw. As he said in Piotr Czerkawski's interview for Dziennik Gazeta Prawna:

All of my ancestors were farmers, so I was sure that I would follow in their footsteps. Back then it seemed so abstract to me to even work as a clerk, let alone a film director.

He grew up in the countryside. He helped his parents on the farm and in the nearby marketplace, he used to sell cucumbers and potatoes. These days he assures that the peaceful atmosphere of the village shaped his sensitivity and imagination. He always did a lot of reading, borrowing one book after another from the local library. When the resources of the library became insufficient, he started to buy books during weekly trips to Sieradz.

Quite early on, he got interested in cinema. The television in his family house received only one channel – public Jedynka. However, it presented some classics, so he watched Bergman, Tarkovsky, Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda. In an interview for Culture.pl he admitted:

I did not really understand those films, but in a way I have soaked them up. From these TV sessions arose the desire to get involved with the cinema.

As a teenager, he used to travel the 200 km to Warsaw to watch the most interesting new releases in Muranów cinema. However, he never applied to the Łódź Film School. He lacked self-confidence, and studying film directing seemed too elitist to him. As a result, he studied sociology and became engaged in social activities. After many years, he decided to participate in a documentary course run by the Wajda School.

"He is something of a missionary of culture" – wrote Tadeusz Sobolewski about Stasik. It is because Stasik is not only a film director but also an animator of cultural activities. In the Film Nursery School run by the Film School of Wajda, he taught children the basics of filmmaking. In 2002, he founded Towarzystwo Inicjatyw Twórczych "ę" (Society for Creative Initiatives "ę"), whose task was to 'create a world where people with passion work for themselves and for others'. He has organized film and photographic workshops, as well as an overview of underground – Jutro Kina (Cinema of Tomorrow).

In 2008, together with Thierry Paladino, Maciej Cuske and Marcin Sauter, he created Film Studio Paladino which independently produced a film titled Andrzej Wajda: Let's Shoot!. It is one of the most witty and most authentic documentary portraits of the Polish master. In 2008-2010, he was also the president of the Film 1,2 Association that supports young artists in the realization of their debut and second films.

As Stasik said in an interview for Culture.pl:

After completing the course on documentary filmmaking at the Wajda School, I still had the feeling that I did not know exactly how to deal with the matter of cinema. I even thought of changing my career path.

Everything changed when he was invited to participate in the film project Rosja – Polska. Nowe Spojrzenie (Russia-Poland. New Look). Within the framework of this project, Stasik made the documentary film 7 x Moscow, which was very well received at festivals. Moreover, students of VGIK, a prestigious film school in Moscow, considered the film an exemplary documentary film about Moscow.

He has visited Russia several times. One of the outcomes of his trips is a documentary made in 2010 – Koniec lata (The Last Day of Summer). It tells the story of students from the school of cadets in Russian Penza, 700 km away from Moscow. Provincial Russia reminded him of Poland two decades ago, and the lives of young protagonists of his film reflected his own childhood. In this documentary, he depicted the everyday life of young boys, political indoctrination and the end of childhood.

By telling the stories of others, he also speaks about himself. In the short film Above the Pavements made in 2008, he showed an eminently capable 17-year-old boy from provincial Szlarska Poręba. To get to school, his protagonist had to get up at 5 in the morning. After high school classes, he went to music school, returning home after 8pm to practice Chopin’s compositions on a dilapidated piano. One day, the boy received an invitation to a music workshop, during which he met his champion – Hungarian pianist Szabolcs Esztén. As Stasik said in a radio interview for Trójka after the release of A Diary of a Journey: 'When I was a teenager, and when I was digging potatoes, I dreamed of a champion coming to see me'.

After years, with this very film he fulfilled a dream of travelling with "the master". The idea behind the film was inspired by Michał, a fifteen-year-old student of Stasik from Przedszkole Filmowe (Film Nursery) of Wajda School, who wanted to make a film about Tadeusz Rolke. The film was not shot eventually, but he asked Rolke, the Polish master of photography, to teach him how to take pictures. His camper van was turned into a photographic darkroom, and they hit the road across Poland. Stasik joined them in order to record a story about master and apprentice. However, the documentary he made turned out to be something more – a moving portrait of the artist and a story of the curiosity of life, which cannot be destroyed by old age.

A Diary of a Journey was awarded at the 53rd Kraków Film Festival in 2013, and received the Golden Grape for Best Documentary Film at Lubusz Summer of Films. In 2014, it received the Andriy Matrosov Prize at the Docudays UA festival in Kiev.

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Maciej Kuziemski and Piotr Stasik, photo: Domestic Product

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In 2014, together with Maciej Kuziemski, Stasik initiated a project called Domestic Product. In an off-road vehicle with an inflatable cinema screen of 40 square metres, a generator unit and a projector, they set off on a journey from Warsaw to Rangoon through Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Romania. In the towns they passed through, they organized open-air screenings of Polish films: from fairy tales for children, the documentaries, to the classic of Polish animation.

In 2016, Stasik presented his next documentary film. 21 X New York was the result of a journey to the eponymous city in order to try to capture its spirit. As he said in an interview with Anna Bielak for Onet:

People who come to New York are often lonely and rather complicated. They find it difficult to adjust to the world or other people. New York attracts not only artists, but also those who feel bad elsewhere. Someone once said that it’s people to whom the law of gravity doesn’t apply. They’re not fit for their countries, families, and friends, so they venture to New York to find a new life.

Stasik grants these people a voice in his trance-like, poetic work. The director created an unusual motion picture – it is more of a essay in film form than a typical participatory documentary. New York as seen by Piotr Stasik is a swirling vortex of passion, disappointment and yearning.

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"21 x Nowy Jork" - ZWIASTUN

Stasik depicts twenty-one people he met on the New York subway, but he is not interested in where they live or how they earn a living. Instead, Stasik is curious about their feelings, the little dreams which push their mundane lives forward, and their failures. 21 x New York is devoid of sociological ambitions; it is more of a documentary story about tormented souls and an insatiable hunger for intimacy.

At the 56^th edition of the Kraków Film Festival, Stasik’s documentary won the award for best production – more specifically, the prize went to Agnieszka Wasiak. In November 2016 21 x New York was shortlisted for the European Film Awards.

In 2017 Stasik made Opera About Poland – a cinematic collage, buzzing with a disturbing trance-like ambience. The director collected the film’s content over a period of nearly 10 years. He used diverse material – scenes recorded while he was travelling through Poland, fragments of speeches, archival materials. Stasik was inspired by Elementarz (The Elementary) by Wojciech Wiszniewski, commonly held as one of Polish documentary cinema’s masterpiece. The composer Artur Zagajewski was responsible for the score – sound is crucial to Opera About Poland, at times even central to the storytelling. The film was nominated for the Orły (Eagle) Polish Film Awards in the documentary film category, and awarded at the Kraków Film Festival.

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TRAILER / Opera about Poland / DIR: Piotr Stasik

A year later Stasik shot the short film Fortepian Chopina (Chopin’s Piano) – an educational documentary about the Buchholtz piano, the instrument that the Polish composer used to create his very first works as a teenager.

In 2020, at the Kraków Film Festival, Stasik’s next film was released – Altered States of Consciousness, a documentary about autistic children and teenagers. The film is stylistically similar to his previous works – trance-like, with gloomy music and blurred, poetic cinematography. The film consists of interviews with the young people and scenes from their everyday lives.

The diligent director presented his next films several months later – first, Let's Try to Jump Into the Well premiered at Docs Against Gravity Festival. The documentary followed rehearsals for Kafka's The Trial directed by Krystian Lupa – one of the most important shows of the season. The film was co-directed and co-written by film editor Dorota Wardęszkiewicz. The jury of DAG gave the film a special prize:

We have decided to give a special prize for a film that portrays an artist in a manner completely different than what we're used to. It shows an excellent director utterly helpless against his vampirically consuming work process. The despair and ineffectuality eventually give rise to art.

It is indeed so – the portrait of the director, created by Stasik and Wardęszkiewicz, is evidently not hagiographic. Where the jury saw Lupa as helpless, others might notice work methods that seem controversial, to put it mildly – as Stanisław Godlewski wrote in his text Studnia Bez Dna for the academic theatre journal Dialog.

Stasik's feature debut, The Moths, premiered at the Gdynia Film Festival in December 2020 (due to the pandemic, the festival was held online), presented in the microbudget film category. The Moths is a story about a group of boys who flee a gaming camp after their educators turn the Internet off. In a panel organised during the Gdynia Film Festival, Stasik said that his initial idea was actually almost pastoral: he wanted to make a film about his own childhood in the Polish countryside. However, after he and Łukasz Czapski started writing the script, it turned out the artists were drawn to a completely different genre: survival. The result is a film that could be dubbed a modern version of Lord of the Flies.

Filmography:

2020 – The Moths (Ćmy)
2020 – Let's Try to Jump Into the Well (Spróbujmy skoczyć do studni)
2020 – Altered States of Consciousness (Odmienne stany świadomości)
2017 – Opera About Poland (Opera o Polsce)
2016 – 21 x New York (21 x Nowy Jork)
2013 – A Diary of a Journey (Dziennik z podróży)
2012 – Nie dla Każdego
2010 – Jak Zrobić Film
2010 – The Last Day of Summer (Koniec lata)
2008 – Andrzej Wajda: Let's Shoot! (Andrzej Wajda: Róbmy zdjęcie!)
2008 – Above the Pavements (Ponad chodnikami)
2005 – One by One (Po kolei)
2005 – 7 x Moscow (7 x Moskwa)

Sources: Gazeta Wyborcza, Cinema Enchante, Polskie Radio, own materials

Author: Bartosz Staszczyszyn, 10.07.2014, trans. GS, 11.07.2014, latest update by NS, May 2021

documentary films

director

documentary film-maker