Her new book is nature writing, too but this is nature as experienced from the inside. Stroud was shortlisted for the Wainwright prize for nature writing for her debut memoir, The Wild Other. As Stroud battles through pregnancy, labour, breastfeeding, and meetings with the school about Jimmy’s weed habit, her third and fourth children, Dash and Evangeline, wheel about in a world of spilled cornflakes and imaginary cats. Meanwhile her daughter Dolly is grappling with dyslexia and the onset of puberty. We get a remarkable 360-degree view of many different stages of mothering, all happening at once: she lives through the passionate intensity of her first attachment with Lester, just as her eldest son, 16-year-old Jimmy, is in the process of separation, his adolescence “compelling us further and further apart, once magnets, now repelled”. The book follows Stroud and her family through a tumultuous year, in which her fifth child, Lester, is born. The business of bringing a person into the world, after all, is not cute or clean or fluffy. When someone gives her new baby a stuffed toy monkey, she longs to surround him with more ancient and serious things: the Bible, The Complete Works of Shakespeare. There are no pastel colours here Stroud’s mother-love is “as raw and rare as cutting through the soft dark crimson of uncooked liver”. The motherhood she describes is the very antithesis of the sanitised, smiling vision we are sold in washing powder ads. They were also determined to ensure that their film looked cinematic, not like grungy vérité footage shot on the hoof after closing time.What does being a mother really feel like? Clover Stroud’s powerhouse of a memoir gets closer than anything else I have read to answering that question. They needed to show the same stamina and energy as their two young subjects. He and his technicians made sure their gear was lightweight and their cameras had enough battery life to shoot for hours at a time. Sometimes, we’d have a day off just to prepare all the gear,” Marczak recalls. “I was extremely strict about all the technical stuff. Marczak would shoot the young hedonists on the streets and rooftops or at their parties but he would then re-record their dialogue. Kris and Michal are art students who are performing as themselves for the filmmakers. There was never the attempt to hide the camera. All These Sleepless Nights blurs lines between what would normally be considered documentary and what is drama. There’s a something bizarre about the idea of a film crew following the two young men from party to party, filming them at raves and at their most intimate moments. ![]() Those younger people who are out on the streets all night, they somehow all know each other.” “For the first time in Poland, we have this completely free generation,” Marczak, in his mid-thirties himself, says of his twenty-something protagonists. The Warsaw of All These Sleepless Nights is certainly a much more alluring place than the grey, oppressive city shown in so many episodes of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog or in Andrzej Wajda films of the 1970s and 1980s. ![]() ![]() There’d be curfews, secret police and too much political weight to carry, and no one would have had the money or the time to devote themselves to such narcissistic enjoyment. When Poland was under martial law, he says, you wouldn’t find youngsters roaming from party to party, “taking over the streets and the clubs”. The film is also intended as a little slice of social history. ![]() These were key formative moments in their protagonists’ lives. Marczak and his crew followed the friends on their night-time for over a year, for “two summers and a winter”, as he puts it. “This has been happening in cinema for a long time,” he says. He adds that other directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Michael Winterbottom and Robert Flaherty have also combined documentary and dramatic techniques in the same way.
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