THE FIRST DAY

POLISH TITLE: DZIEŃ PIERWSZY

The film tells the story of Arek, Wojtek and Sebastian, three boys sent to the Young Offenders Institution in the south-central Polish town of Racibórz. We encounter them while they are still in the institution, where they are intensely engaged in drama
workshops and are nurturing naïve dreams connected with their imminent return to freedom. Unfortunately, freedom turns out to be a tough challenge for all three of them. We follow their fortunes over a fortnight of their lives.

GENRE:
documentary
COUNTRY:
Polska
RUNNING TIME:
28'
YEAR:
COLOUR:
colour
DIRECTING:
Daniel Banaczek
SCRIPT:
Daniel Banaczek
DOP:
Michał Bożek
EDITOR:
Rafał Salata
PRODUCTION:
Studio Filmowe KRONIKA, Studio Munka

Daniel Banaczek »

A director of television programmes, social and artistic animateur and drama instructor, Daniel Banaczek graduated in philosophy from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and from the TV Production Department at the Łódź Film School. He has taken part in the European Social Documentary (ESoDoc) programme run by the ZeLIG School for Documentary, Television and New Media in Bolzano, Italy. For seven years, he has been the director of the highly popular Kuchenne Rewolucje (Kitchen Revolution) for TVN. Prior to that, he made programmes for the Discovery Historia TVN channel, now Discovery Historia, and for Poland’s national television corporation, Telewizja Polska (TVP). Between 1998 and 2005, he designed and completed several dozen social and artistic projects with socially excluded groups; one of those projects was the Radar programme at the 50 th Venice Biennale (2003). The First Day is his debut documentary, which he began working on in 2004 and finished in 2018.