Two young Polish hairstylists were featured in the main competition on Tuesday in the feature film debut of Grzegorz Zariczny Waves. The director does not however suppress his experience as a documentary filmmaker. Both main characters are nonprofessional actors and real hairstylists, though one of them no longer works in the field. "I didn't make much in the salon, so I started doing something else instead," admitted Anna Kęsek.
The director found her friend Katarzyna Kopeć at a film workshop in Krakow. His main ambition in Waves was to show the life and problems of women from lower-class families, whose parents couldn't find their place after the fall of communism. He worked on the script a lot with the protagonists. "The film was made from day to day. When we wrapped up shooting for the day we'd sit down and decide what we were going to shoot the next day. The technical part of the crew didn't like us much for that," said Zariczny, describing how the film was created.
The girls took the whole experience as an interesting adventure. "It would be nice to shoot something else, but it's probably not up to us," said Anna on her possible future acting career. The thirty-three-year-old director also touched on the future of Polish film, saying that filmmakers lack mutual contact in Poland. "Unless we become more connected, nothing like the 'cinema of moral anxiety' will arise again."
