Anything Can Happen is a 1995 Polish documentary. The director spares little time for social concerns in favour of issues of an existential nature that touch individual lives. The main protagonist is a little boy curious about the world.
Tomek discovers the world by pacing a park on his scooter, stopping to smell flowers, chase butterflies, and feed squirrels. However, the most important are his stops beside park benches where old people rest. The boy engages them in conversations, confronting his knowledge with their experiences. He manages to create a certain natural aura which daily interhuman relations lack. He asks his interlocutors unobvious questions, like for instance: ‘how long will you live?’, ‘what would you do if you were born again?’ and they answer them willingly, confessing to Tomek what lies in their hearts. Bożena Janicka wrote in 1995 in Kino:
Marcel Łoziński’s quasi-documentary is indeed a poetic essay filled with the sadness of passing and the strength of life. But it is something more than that: Anything Can Happen captures a man growing inside a child. Through solidarity and compassion brought with contact with other people, the boy defines himself. An old man from the film would probably say that the soul is born within him. This what's most unbelievable in Marcel Łoziński’s film.
Krzysztof Kornacki reviewed the film in 1998 in Kwartalnik Filmowy:
In dialogues between old people and the boy a constant confrontation of a childish, irrational imagination with a sober point of view resulting from rich experiences occurs. At the same time, in the seeming irrationality of the boy a method is hidden – Tomek lacks restrictions that hamstring imagination when arranging the world. He is like the Little Prince, who sees a swallowed boa constrictor in the place of a hat. He brings hope, if only for a moment, into old people’ lives – for that pleasure they get from honest confessions that change his vision of the world and help him mature. Everything happens in the scenery of the garden from which the man once walked out but to which, if one believes in it, the man will come back.
Marcel Łoziński’s Anything Can Happen ended first in the web vote for the best Polish documentary in history.
- Wszystko może się przytrafić (Anything Can Happen) Poland, 1995. Written and directed by Marcel Łoziński, cinematography: Arthur Reinhart, music consultant: Małgorzata Jaworska, sound: Halina Paszkowska, editing: Katarzyna Maciejko-Kowalczyk, production: Kalejdoskop Film Studio, Telewizja Polska. Colour, 40'.
Awards:
- Grand Prix Złoty Smok and FIPRESCI award at MFFK Kraków '95
- FICC at MFFK Oberhausen '95
- Grand Prix and Kodak award at Baltic Film and Television Festival Gudhjem'95 (Bornholm)
- Polityka Passport
- Fundacja Kultury Special Award
- Golden Gate at MFF San Francisco '96
- INPUT '96
- First Prize at World Television Festival Tokio '97 in documentary film category
Source: PAP, own information, compiled by BS., translated by Antoni Wiśniewski, April 2016
