King Matt the First
(Poland, 75 min.)
Dir. Jaśmina Wójcik
Programme: International Spectrum (World premiere)
A childlike sense of wonder informs Jaśmina Wójcik’s creative documentary King Matt the First. It’s a playfully and adventurously observant work. One should expect no less from Wójcik after her 2018 Hot Docs award winner Symphony of the Ursus Factory. That artful doc conjures an ode to labour by inviting former employees of defunct factory to re-enact their roles on the assembly line, all the projecting the whirs, clinks, and clanks that the machines would make if they were still active. Admittedly, Wójcik’s first feature, King Matt, lacks audacious originality of Ursus, but the fact that it’s not such an immediate novelty demands that audiences bask in its free-flowing exploration of childhood. It patiently invites one to see the world through child’s eyes.
Those eyes specifically belong to sisters Zola and Lea. “Specifically” may be a stretch, though. The film’s point of view shares a perspective with Zola and Lea’s parents: Wójcik and cinematographer Jakub Wróblewski. This family affair takes creative inspiration from Polish novelist Janusz Korczak’s book King Matt the First, which imaginatively conjures a voyage through the lens of a young boy forced to grow up too soon.
King Matt the First, the documentary, follows Zola and Lea through free-flowing summer days. They run in the forests, bash a dead fish with a stick, and wander through the verdant landscape. Wójcik and Wróblewski observe their daughters with a lyrical eye. This is one of those films where the camera soaks up the sun and bides its time trailing its subjects as they twirl in the fields.
There’s no cogent story here, but the best summer days of childhood often lack a narrative of their own. The family portrait simply lets the kids play. It finds the drama in the sibling rivalry and the distance that eventually grows between the sisters as they age.
Forces of the outside world permeate the film, too. The familial nature of the project, for one, unmistakably marks it as a COVID-era diversion. Zola and Lea have little to do while the world’s shut down. They might as well make a movie with mom and dad.
At times, that does mean that King Matt the First feels an artful exercise in making sense of this strange time together. It’s not merely a collective time-waster for the family, per se, but the film has that sense of containment that defines many pandemic stories. The artistic pedigree immediately elevates it though, as the passing time eventually invites method to the madness. If the COVID bubble has a universal morale, it’s the ability to sense the passage of time. This film shares what it’s like to watch your kids grow up.
The portrait ultimately creates a shared observation of what it means to come of age as children and as parents. The perspective poetically conveys how kids often look to their parents for answers, but the parents themselves are figuring things out on the fly. Parenting in theory is one thing, but doing it in reality proves another. But working it out can only be done together.
