The Film
Zgodnie z naturą was a school initiative. The brief was simple: make a film about the biological character of your district. No expectation of anything polished.
I decided to take it further.
Saska Kępa — Warsaw’s garden district, modernist villas, the Vistula nearby, Skaryszewski Park — felt like a place worth doing properly. So alongside co-directors Szymon Płatek and Łukasz Brierre, I organized a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to hire a drone operator. That one decision changed everything about what the film could be.
What Happened
The film ran twelve minutes. No narrator. Aerial footage, street scenes, resident interviews. The neighborhood speaks for itself.
What followed was unexpected. Local television and radio invited us for interviews. A few hundred people came to the premiere. The film was picked up by TVN24 — one of Poland’s biggest news channels. And on YouTube, it reached almost 17,000 views.
For a school project about biological aspects of a Warsaw neighborhood, that was not what anyone predicted.
Why It Matters to Me
This was my first film. Somewhere in the process of making it — organizing shoots, working with people, shaping raw footage into something that felt true to a place — I figured out what I wanted to do. The project is sentimental for exactly that reason: it’s where I discovered filmmaking.
Everything since has been some version of that same impulse: take something seriously enough to do it properly, even when nobody asked you to.