Krzysztof (Krzysztof Bagiński) and Michał (Michał Huszcza) are both in their twenties, and have a lot of spare time and in-depth knowledge about party sites in the capital of Poland. They live next to the Palace of Culture and Science, sleep during the day, and come out at night to set off into the city to give themselves over to Warsaw’s night life. They visit parties, concerts, and bars, float around the city, meet girls, take drugs, get drunk and smoke one cigarette after another…
Michał Marczak accompanies the protagonists on those night-time journeys – follows their pace and pulses with their rhythm. Unfortunately, apart from using a camera, he uses a microphone too. This turns out to be unfortunate, as the dialogues we hear on the screen turn the air blue and makes us sick with the overflow of pretentiousness. Marczak's film is both fascinating and exhausting – seduces us with cinematography and incredible music, but annoys with babbling and dramaturgic emptiness.
Film stories about youth are always filled with a certain paradox – they are most often filmed by people much older than their protagonists. Tired with their own lives, the film makers look at their protagonists either with a sense of superiority or with affection, ending either with patronising or with idealising the young protagonists as their better, happier versions.
Against this background, All the Sleepless Nights seems to be exceptional. Marczak does not place the overwhelming burden of commitment on the shoulders of his protagonists. He is not interested in any kind of pedagogical causeries about youth living without any rules and aims, but does not want to show youth as a missing paradise. Marczak's camera accompanies the two in their daily, or rather nightly, routine. He does not comment, neither does he attach any explanations. He just watches.
The film was created as a hybrid of fiction and documentary. The image contended in Gdynia in the fiction film category, whereas in Sundance it won a prize for the best documentary film. Bundling the film into categories does not make any sense as All the Sleepless Nights is not a documentary, nor a work of fiction, though it tries to be both. Here lies the greatest weakness and the greatest strength of the film.