Rwetes / Hurly Burly
2014 · 17m · Polonia
Directed by Kuba Czekaj
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A recording of the observation of several hours in the life of a young woman in which, in principle, nothing in particular happens — banal activities, repeated over and over. And yet, the most dramatic events tend to be exactly those gaps in existence.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Czekaj does the unthinkable—makes a 17-minute film about *nothing* and somehow resists the urge to wink at the audience about it, which means it's either brilliantly boring or just boring, and I genuinely can't tell which yet.
The formal rigor here is exquisite: Czekaj's commitment to the durational observation of quotidian repetition places this squarely in a lineage from Warhol through contemporary slow cinema, where the editing restraint itself becomes the argument about what constitutes dramatic event.
The choice to let the camera simply *witness* without intervening—no score, no montage tricks, just the accumulation of small domestic gestures—is what transforms banality into something that actually registers as alive.