On the 4th of April Breaking Ground and Holland Doc present a special around director Bartosz Warwas. 

Every month a new fascinating European student documentary on the digital television channel Holland Doc. A month before the screening date you can find here which film is going to surprise you this month. This edition we have a special around director Bartosz Warwas.

Bartosz Warwas (1978) was born in Cracow. Since 2006 he has been studying at

the directing department in Polish National Film School in Lodz. His films have been screened on numerous international festivals including Berlin, Bilbao, Cologne, New Delhi, Tehran, Bucharest, Badalona, Monterrey, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro.

Triathlon is not a classic documentary film. It is rather a documentary fairy tale: once upon a time in a country beyond many seas and islands, beyond high mountains, beyond large rivers, lived a Man who had a lot of problems. One day he decided to face it...




Koluszki Blues (Nowhere Blues) 
Far, far away, in a small town beyond distant mountains and an enormous forest, The Braid is trapped. Only Great Love can release him. While waiting patiently for It to come, The Braid is combing his long beard which houses all his powers...

Time to ask him some questions:

Where do you get your inspiration for your films?

What interests me most in documentary film is how certain people manage to
live their lives their own way no matter what the circumstances and public
response are. We use to call them eccentrics, or even freaks. But it doesnt
mean I am looking for characters, who can be ridiculed. I highly appreciate
and respect them. I admire their idealism and daydreaming, the goals they
set, the courage to go against the flow, and as a result of this, readiness
to face solitude and lack of understanding.

I always tend to make my documentaries with an optimistic undertone, so that
they give the people who watch it a lot of hope and courage to live their
lives the way they want.

What do you think is the most important to make a documentary?

What I value most is invention and courage in the context of how the filmed
reality undergoes the process of artistic creation. The world in a
documentary film does not have to be only a one-to-one correspondence to
reality. Processing it with the directors creative tools may often tell
more about the problems of contemporary world than the traditional
documentary observation or report.


What is your next project?

Currently I am preparing myself for a documentary about a married couple,
who devote their entire lives to animals. They live in a 40 square meters
flat with 15 cats and 2 dogs, and above that they feed countless number of
stray cats. Having been married for 30 years now, the couple is still in
love with each other, although the wife is 20 years older than her husband...