Partying in Warsaw: Fact? Fiction? Who knows?

“All These Sleepless Nights” is one of those movies that provoke arguments among viewers, arguments as interesting as the film itself — maybe more so.

The movie focuses on a couple of young men in Warsaw and their adventures at parties and in nightclubs, their interactions with women and, generally, how they pass their time.

(In 2015, it received support from the Sundance Institute’s documentary film program.) Except the movie totally lacks that grainy sense of immediacy and “reality” that often marks documentaries — here, that’s replaced by sophisticated camerawork and set-ups that we usually associate with fictional films.

The way the camera swirls around a pair of people dancing is on a par with Hollywood’s finest.

[...] the lead characters, and their friends, aren’t actors — they are young Polish people who are shown doing what they normally do, which bears out the nonfiction label.

Director Michal Marczak (who also wrote and shot the movie) set out to portray the lives of the current generation of young Warsaw partying types, and after six months of research in clubs and raves and the like, found Michal Huszcza and Krzysztof Baginski, and spent 18 months filming them.

Scenes were set up using improvisational techniques, again blurring the line between fact and fiction.

Women enter and leave the lives of the two main men; at least one woman in the film was actually introduced to them by the filmmaker, which raises yet more questions.