Hot Docs 2022 presents The Balcony Movie

The Balcony Movie (2021), written and directed by Pawel Lozinski, is a charming character-driven documentary where passers-by including some of his neighbors are confronted with existential questions such as “what’s the meaning of life?”

Lozinski has placed his camera in a fixed position on his balcony filming the passers-by who traverse the camera’s frame of reference – the sidewalk space below his balcony and its immediate surroundings.  As it happens, his documentary references the first attempts of filmmaking by the famous French  Lumière brothers and their first film “La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (1895) where the brothers positioned the camera in a fixed spot filming workers leaving the Lumière factory.

 
His “slice-of-life” documentary captures intimate glimpses into his characters’ lives where they share their lived experiences, thoughts, feelings, and ideas in the camera’s frame of reference.  The documentary is totally watchable.  You will listen attentively.  You will smile.  You will laugh.  You will recoil too for his documentary also captures the ugliness of hate speech.

Lozinski has limited himself to a few filmmaking techniques and visual elements to create an insightful documentary.   Over-the-head wide-angle shots are interspersed at times with over-the-head close-ups and medium-angle shots of his characters.  The film incorporates day and night footage, mostly day, shot over a lengthy period of time.  He uses the changing seasons, summer, fall, winter, and spring to give structure to his film, and relies on a small cast of characters to drive the narrative and demonstrate the passage of time and changed circumstances. The audio consists mainly of his conversations between himself and his subjects with elements of ambient sound and background noise such as the sounds of nature and the din of traffic.  There is a song sung by one of the characters and a little music that is layered mostly over footage towards the end of the documentary.   Sometimes, he follows his cast of characters panning them as they leave the camera’s fixed frame of reference, and/or spotting them from a distance and inviting them to come closer to be interviewed.  Characters enter the camera’s frame of reference from various angles, right of the camera, left of the camera, and above the camera.  And with these self-imposed limitations in filmmaking, he has crafted a well-made documentary that speaks to the truth and authenticity of life.

 Lozinski succeeds in creating intimate portraits of a diverse cross-section of society from the very young to the very old across gender lines and sexual orientations and stations in life to shine a light on a plenitude of emotions and lived experiences.  It’s a gem of a documentary and deserving of your attention.