A Polish Documentary: What Are We Watching?
This week’s viewing is a Polish documentary, You Have No Idea How Much I Love You (2016), an eighty-minute film built almost entirely from close-ups of a mother, a daughter and their therapist. It is a remarkable lesson in how little you need to hold an audience. This week at Crash Symphony Productions, in order to inform our approach to corporate video production, we’re watching You Have No Idea How Much I Love You (2016) a film by Polish writer and director Paweł Łoziński. Seen as part of the Sydney Film Festival, it’s a highly unusual film in many senses.
This Polish documentary is vaguely biographical because the two actresses are talking about their own personal experiences, but not entirely since for ethical reasons psychotherapy sessions are not allowed to be filmed and released to the public. For this reason, it doesn’t have a writer, rather the script is almost entirely improvised between the three individuals. The person centring the dialogue is Professor Bogdan de Barbaro, a real-life eminent psychotherapist from Kraków. In fact, the movie is nothing but a conversation involving three individuals, featuring no music, and taking place entirely in extreme close-ups that shift between the three interlocutors, and yet it is entirely riveting.
The film is a just showcasing of the therapeutic powers of psychotherapy. It’s enthralling and awe-inspiring to see Bogdan de Barbaro work, like magic, around the minefields of the relationship between this mother and daughter.
Therapy on Camera
In this Polish documentary his questions probe and direct them into a space where they can unpack what at first seems like a hopeless situation; they are so triggered by one another, stuck in such a loop that their discomfort is palpable, the mother stifling and suffocating, the daughter avoidant and distant–which only serves to feed into the loop further, and tighten their knot. This is why it’s all the more remarkable how Bogan disarms these triggers, how he gets them to a stage where they can begin to loosen this knot, and see each other clearly for once, without the endless triggers that go into feeding their dysfunctional cycle.
Director: Paweł Łozinski
Country: Poland
Runtime: 80 mins
Language: Polish with English subtitles
Classification: 15+
Year: 2016
Screenwriter: Paweł Łoziński
Producer: Paweł Łozinski, Agnieszka Mankiewicz
Cinematographer: Kacper Lisowski
Editor: Dorota Wardęszkiewicz
This Polish documentary is a reminder that a single well-lit face and honest sound can carry a whole film, an idea we bring to our own corporate video production. Contact us about your project, and read more about director Paweł Łoziński on Wikipedia.
