Polish director Krzysztof Kasior has a phrase which sums up perfectly his approach to documentary. He talks of the “patient eye.” When he was a student at the Krzysztof Kieslowski Film School, his teachers emphasised the importance of filmmakers taking the time to win the trust of their subjects.
Kasior’s new film Fury (premiering in the International Competition at Doc Fest Munich) is about Polish MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighter, Aleksandra Rola. There are several scenes of cage fighting here and plenty of footage of brutal training sessions in the gym in which Aleksandra is pushed to go “faster, faster,” by her demanding coach.
This, though, isn’t the conventional Rocky-style story. It’s an observational documentary in which the emphasis is on psychology and behaviour rather than on sporting glory or failure.
“When I was looking for this girl, I met seven different fighters, seven different girls,” the director remembers. All of them had similarly tough backgrounds. Most had grown up in families blighted by alcoholism. “Probably, that makes these girls fight,” he speculates as to what motivates the women to participate in such an extreme sport. “They are fighting because they must be strong inside.”
Aleksandra comes from a small town. She has endured gruelling emotional experiences which, at times, pushed her close to breakdown and even suicide. MMA gives her the chance to put her life back together. Her goal is to compete in the amateur World Championships in Las Vegas.
Kasior spent “half a year” gaining the confidence of Aleksandra and her parents before beginning shooting. “You have to spend so much time with your characters that, after some time, they just forget about you and behave in a normal way,” he says of his fly-on-the-wall approach. He had a hunch early on that Aleksandra would make it to Las Vegas. He also realised that whether she won or lost there, her life would be very different after she returned to Poland.
To the outside eye, MMA looks very brutal. Aleksandra is shown in fights in which she or her opponent are choked into submission or in which they have blood streaming down their faces. The director insists that the sport is less violent than, say, heavyweight boxing. Aleksandra herself is very light, 52 kg; she fights in the Strawweight division. The director believes there is a limit to the damage combatants of that weight can inflict on one another. “It’s strange, I know, two girls fighting in a cage but I recognise this as [being] like a normal sport.”
The director accompanied Aleksandra to Vegas but didn’t like it there. “It’s an ugly city,” he says. “It looks like the scenography of a strange movie.”
As the the World Championships unfold, Aleksandra and her coach experience fury and frustration in equal measure. There were issues later with banned diuretics that Aleksandra had taken when she was trying to lose weight. In a more traditional sports movie, their sense of injustice and the controversy surrounding the drugs test would have been foregrounded. However, Kasior moves swiftly on from both subjects.
Four years on from the start of filming, the director and his subject are now friends. “She likes me, which is good!” Aleksandra, who has now turned professional, has seen the documentary and has given it her blessing. Nonetheless, the director doesn’t expect his doc will appeal to fans of MMA.
“I don’t think that it’s a movie about martial arts. I don’t think the community will find the movie interesting. It is much more about her, about Aleksandra, than about the sport.”
The director is unapologetic about his verité-like approach in Fury. You won’t find voice overs, talking head interviews or the subjects addressing the camera directly here. “To be honest, if I watch a Netflix documentary, I don’t think it’s documentary. I’m not going to say that they [Netflix documentaries] are not good…but they are different documentaries to what I think about documentaries,” he says, returning to the theme of the ‘patient eye.’ Observation, he argues, is always what matters most.
Fury was produced by Adam Ślesicki through Film Frame, a unit of Władysław Ślesicki Film Foundation.
