HAPPY MAN

Director's Statement

As your feature film debut, you make a gloomy and slow film about death - HAPPY MAN. Why this subject in particular?
I have been reared on serious literature: Mann, Hesse, Dostoevsky, Miłosz and Różewicz. I used to seek answers to the same questions they have been asking the world as well as me. And with the kind of life I lived I developed a desire to express my own artistic statement. I do not want to bother with unimportant things. What I want art to do is redeem man.

Serious things do not boil down only to death ...
The film also talks about love. And death? Today we make it seem as if there was no death. In the past, people used to prepare for it. Today, it takes us aback. I often wonder what will happen after death or when all those close to me will depart. Therefore, I live more fully and mature more quickly than I would if I thought about money and my career only. I am of the opinion that the quotidian, like shopping, friends, or quarrels are not necessarily the subjects that qualify for artistic discourse. I look for metaphors and believe, like I said. that art could redeem and pluck such strings in man's heart that would make him undergo catharsis.

Would you like your film HAPPY MAN to bring about redemption?
I just hope for my film to be able to move someone, leave something in the moviegoer to make him mull over life and its goals, and, consequently, to make him depart from the quotidian. I especially chose the difficult subject of death and love, fully aware that the young are fascinated with a fuller life than the one filled only with passing fads.

How much do you think of your experience as a director of documentaries has been brought to bear on this feature?
Quite a tot. That experience has taught me that I am not the most important. I do not happen to be interesting enough as a human to talk exclusively about myself.
Egocentrism, screening everything through one's own frame of reference, bringing out one's own ordeals and traumas into the picture is often detrimental to its artistic outcome.
Kazimierz Karabasz, who used to teach me in film school, would emphasize that it is of greatest importance to view fellow men and the world with humility and to never lose interest in the world. And it was my work on documentaries that has developed this interest in me. What Karabasz also used to teach was how not to strive to achieve shallow dazzling effects.

Your leads, the mother and her son, are in a sorry plight, seemingly helpless when faced with reality. Your own milieu, however, is in all probability quite different.
Correct. Mine is that of movie directors and cameramen. But this does not blind me to the fate of those less fortunate, who live through terrible dramas that I do not have to incur. I look with admiration at those who can live on the average national pay or those whom nobody wants to hire because they are too old. I have a lot of respect and sympathy for them. And that is why, though not one of them, I tell a story about them.
Building the relationship between the mother and her son I drew on my own experience of my love for my parents. That kind of love is often an incredibly helpless feeling that suffocates.
I felt the need to say that at times we cannot express love, but all we can come up with is a lump in the throat and to do the exact opposite of what is expected.