There’s a moment capturing the spirit that drives Agnieszka Zwiefka’s documentary Vika! and it involves the character at the center of the film — an 84-year-old Lithuanian-born Polish DJ — as she sums up her dress sense, as much as she does her life
“The older I get, the more colorful I become,” says Wirginia “Vika” Szmyt.
The film, which screened Monday at the 29th Vilnius International Film Festival (VIFF), is a slight departure from Zwiefka’s previous productions, including the multiple award-winning illegal refugee focused The Queen of Silence (2014), in that it comes definitely softer in terms of its subject matter. Vika! is also nothing if not inspirational, as its protagonist mixes up her medicine behind the DJ decks in nightclubs and at events in Poland and beyond, while sharing her thoughts on ageing and revelations from a fascinating life, in between scripted musical interludes.
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The film has helped turn Szmyt into a major celebrity at home, and abroad, as Zwiefka explains during a video call from the sidelines of VIFF.
“She’s even on a huge billboards,” says Zwiefka. “She’s sometimes getting annoyed by all the attention because she can’t walk down the streets normally anymore without being endlessly stopped. Even on the plane here I swear one third of the plane was pointing at her.”
Vika! is a Max Original coproduction, the second of a three-film deal Zwiefka has with Warner Bros. Discovery, and it has been a hit with audiences across the European festival circuit.
“I think I’ve never made a film that has such a diverse audience,” says Zwiefka. “I have enough experience now to know that this is something you cannot predict. The dynamic of the audience has its own rules. It’s very mysterious.”
How did you come to find this fabulous woman and make a film about her?
It started actually from the topic, not the woman. It started from my fear of aging. I wanted to convince myself that I can age on my own terms, that I can still be myself when I’m 70, plus 80. I think what scares me the most is not the fact that our bodies age, but the fact that I will not be myself intellectually, psychologically — that I will not be able to cope with that. So I started to look for women who would defy the stereotype of aging, especially the one that is associated with Eastern Europe, because we tend to ignore our senior citizens, especially women. They are suddenly invisible and they disappear from the public sphere.
And you previously knew Vika?
I knew about [Vika’s] existence. I went to her parties, I admired her energy. So I asked her to jump on this crazy journey with me, because it was a crazy journey, almost five years in the making. And she agreed, eventually, after she got to know me and the idea behind the topic.
Did she take some convincing? Because the film reveals a lot of very personal things.
I think deep in her heart she is an activist. And she really hoped that with this film she can inspire other senior citizens, especially women, to basically take their lives into their own hands and do something about it, not to just sit and wait for the grandchildren to visit. So that was what got her hooked up. But the problem was that Vika is a very secret person when it comes to personal life. In the film, there are some stories that even her sons were not aware of.
Why, then, do you think she went for it?
I told her that if you don’t show your weaknesses, if you don’t open up, no one will believe that they can have colorful and beautiful senior years. With all the pain and sicknesses, of course, with sometimes increasing loneliness, they don’t have to stop living. That’s what got her into the film, and she started to open up.
What were the challenges in making a somewhat lighter film than your previous work?
It was a completely different experience because usually we make films about dramatic situations and this film is about the joy of life. So how do you capture that? How do you create a dramaturgy around everydayness? And I think that was the biggest challenge.
What was behind your decision to focus on documentaries?
It’s a big question. I’m a very visual person. I believe that images speak more than words. I’m obsessed with filming and even in my personal life I take a lot of photographs. I guess I just want to keep some parts of the world because they may never be kept otherwise. You know, like to memorize them. Film is a wonderful medium also to explore your imagination. That’s why I want to make these documentaries that include the use of imagination, not just standard TV films. I want to play with the genre.
How are opportunities for documentary makers in Europe today?
I think we still have a pretty good situation in Europe but I see that more and more very popular content is needed, like true crime stories, not artistic documentaries. And that’s a shame for me, when I see that a topic wins over an author’s vision. I believe in films that combine both important current issues, but yet have this fingerprint of the director and that differs from what you see on TV.
What else have you been working on?
Silent Trees [which last week made its world premiere at CPH:DOX festival in Denmark]. It tells a ghostly story from Poland, by the Russian border, the refugee crisis. It’s a story of a 16 year old girl whose mother dies in the forest, basically freezes to death. Now this girl has to become a mother for her younger brothers, and a helpless illiterate father. So it’s a story about the end of childhood. We have animated parts in it based on the girl’s drawings. We made her drawings come alive in a series of animated sequences. It’s again [like Vika!] a hybrid, but without musical parts, because I believe that we always need to use the language that our protagonists, our characters speak, to tell their story.
And a definite shift in mood?
It’s like it’s the opposite. We have a lot of lights and glitter [in Vika!] and this other film is much darker, and very, very disturbing. But what I try to do in all my films is to look for light. Like the light inside people in their hearts and mind, even in the worst times
