Starting Point – Michał Szcześniak | #film

Michał Szcześniak’s Starting Point, shortlisted for the Academy Award, is a story about crime and punishment, but also about a fear of freedom and its consequences.

The rhythm of Aneta’s life is determined by prison rituals: reporting to the guards, visiting the tutor, calling home, the evening inspection. Many years before, she was imprisoned for murder. Now, she's reached another turning point – she will probably be released soon and will have to face the consequences of what she did in the past.

Michał Szcześniak met Aneta in a prison in Nysa. She’s been behind bars for nine years. The young director was looking for protagonists for a film about women convicted for murder. It was supposed to be a feature film, then – a story about multiple characters. Szcześniak went around jails, looking for the right people. He was accompanied by Katarzyna Bonda, a journalist and popular crime writer, and also the co-author of the script. When they met Aneta, the vision for the film radically changed and she became the main protagonist.

When she committed murder, Aneta was 19 years old, married to a domineering soldier and mother of a small child. She studied chemistry at the Kraków Polytechnic. She was a rebellious teenager, convinced that she should have the world at her command. The crime she committed ended her dreams but also became a starting point to understanding herself.

The title of Szcześniak’s film has multiple meanings. Both the crime from the past and the release from prison are starting points, as well as the meeting with Helena, Szcześniak’s second protagonist.

Every starting point is also the last stop on one of the stages in Aneta’s life. The story told by the young director is not linear, rather composed from shreds of memories. Short, enigmatic sentences spoken to the camera hide a mystery. Szcześniak knows how to create suspense, and keep the viewer unsure. Only with the passing of time does he reveal the truth about his protagonist, and the audience learns what she did in the past, who her victim was and why she committed such a cruel crime.

Starting Point on Oscars Documentary Shortlist

The person to whom Aneta tells her story is Miss Helena, who lives in a nursing home. Aneta takes care of her when working outside of the prison. This old lady has suffered from rheumatism since childhood and has deformed joints – she uses a wheelchair and cannot get dressed on her own.

The women are two opposites. The old lady, from whom disease took all dreams away, is still able to enjoy life, contrary to Aneta – even though she had everything, she always craved something more and the need to trespass borders became the cause of all her problems. In Szcześniak’s film they talk to each other casually, treating dramatic events as any other subject. Sincere conversations with Helena become another starting point for the protagonist – a starting point to self-acceptance and changing her life.

At first glance Szcześniak’s film seems similar to Jacek Bławut’s documentary Born Dead (the director is Starting Point’s artistic supervisor). In this fantastic movie from 2004, Bławut also looked inside the prison to observe the transformation of a young convict working with disabled children.

Jacek Bławut: A documentary is more than a film from Culture.pl on Vimeo.

The story told by Szcześniak is seemingly very similar. Only on the surface, however, as in Starting Point the young director doesn’t show us the transformation, but tells us about it. Szcześniak’s film is not a classical documentary accompanying the protagonist, but an impression of crime and punishment, built on stories, not images.

The story itself – or, more accurately, the film narrative – becomes one of the protagonists. Michał Szcześniak focuses on building suspense. It’s hard to resist the thought that even the heroine has to back down and create space for the need for cinematic effect. To those who enjoy Jacek Bławut’s or Wojciech Staroń’s films, this movie can seem too much like a report, or even a calculation. This doesn’t change the fact that Szcześniak’s film is impressive because of its precision and faultless dramaturgic construction.

In 2015 Starting Point was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination for best documentary short. Before it was noticed by the American Academy, the film got top prizes in Sheffield and Koszalin, was also noticed at the Camerimage and Sundance festivals. It’s not just a coincidence. Michał Szcześniak’s debut, with great cinematography by Przemysław Niczyporuk, is a moving and skillfully told story about redemption and hope, and yet more proof of the strong position of Polish documentaries.

Author: Bartosz Staszczyszyn, translated by: N. Mętrak-Ruda, November 2015.