Katarzyna Machalek

Director / Producer

I come from Roztocze, a wild forest region in Eastern Poland, where magical rituals and primeval folk beliefs have been strong presences in the lives of its inhabitants for generations.  In Roztocze, you can still meet elderly women that live in blue cottages out by the woods. Witches perform wax-pouring rituals, marshes hide the spirits of our ancestors and every occurrence, however innocuous, can have a deeper, darker meaning.

The women of Roztocze, despite many adversities, have always held together. They share a passion for folk singing and tenderness for each other. When I was a little girl, I used to listen to their stories about magic and curses, which made me feel both afraid and spellbound. After a decade of living in London, I returned to my homeland and rediscovered its exoticism.I asked myself how I could express my everlasting sense of belonging to this community of women and examine the roots of the fear of black magic that has accompanied me since I was a child. I felt I had to make a movie about it.

„Day and Night” is a tale about the closeness of women to each other and to magic, nature, and time. My goal was to show the youth and old age of the women of Roztocze, which intertwine to create a mosaic of life. While working on the script I already knew that I wanted to evoke the most defining moments of these women's pasts. I was also looking for an appropriate film structure to show in an original and nontrivial way how the past and the present overlap. I wanted to show their lives as old women today, alongside the times of their youth in 1959. The formula of hybrid narrative, which combines fiction with purely documentary observation, seemed to be a natural solution. To allow the audience to experience life in this female community in a more empirical way, I tried to render the sounds, scents, tastes, and all the sensual sides of their universe and to slow down the pace of the editing. I also allowed a gallery of vivid supporting characters to appear on the screen.

During the development stage, while talking to my heroines, two contrasting visions of old age emerged before my eyes - a joyful, dynamic one and a melancholic, static one. Therefore, I decided to divide the film into two autonomous parts: "Day" and "Night". The contrast between the different visions of old age contained in the film was symbolically emphasized by using orange as the dominant color in the first part and blue in the second. 

„Day", the story of a friendship between the girls from a folk band, is the hot July sun reflected in alcohol-sticky glasses, the fire of a burning barn, songs sung at full blast, and wrinkles on the faces of old ladies smiling at each other. "Day" is about vitality and togetherness.  

„Night”, a meditation on the old age of a solitary woman, is told through single sounds that disturb the silence and evoke memories - the tapping of dry branches against a window, the dripping of water, the whispering of a prayer for the souls of the dead. "Night" is all about the unspoken, the hidden, the unfulfilled.

Magic, folk beliefs, and singing are deeply rooted in the identity of Eastern Poland. Nature, especially dense pine forests, is for me a place that can take away any sorrow. Observing today's world, I can see how many people long for a return to nature and to such authentic human relationships as those nurtured by the heroines of "Day and Night". I am moved by the fact that these women are able to stand by each other through the thick and thin of life, to experience life together, to heal the traumas of the past, and live with missing each other. This film is a tribute to them all, and a universal story about the need for closeness in everyone's life.