“I made the decision to start working on this film half an hour after I learnt that my father had died,” Polish filmmaker Aneta Ptak tells Business Doc Europe of the genesis of her debut documentary feature Birdie.
“I made the decision to start working on this film half an hour after I learnt that my father had died. Suddenly. I was on the phone with him a day earlier and [this was] the last thing that I could have expected. He went with my mom to pick mushrooms in the forest and he never came back. I was living in New York State at the timeand I packed my bags and went back to Poland. I buried my dad and never got back to my previous life after that.”
“No other experience can compare to the experience of losing a very important person in your life,” she adds. “It’s like there’s something really terrifying and at the same time sacred about it.”
Her father, Krzysztof Ptak, was an acclaimed Polish cinematographer who graduated from the National Film School in Łódź, beginning his career by making documentaries. His most notable works include the films The Dark House (2009), Jasminium (2006) Edi (2002) and The Doll (2013).
The project participated in the Ex Oriente training program in 2023/24 and received both the HBO Max Award (€2,000) and the Golden Funnel for most significant development during the workshop at this year’s edition of East Doc Platform that ran from 22 to 28 March in Prague.
In the film, Ptak ponders on the unexpected series of events that threw her off guard, sweeping away from her the two most important men in her life – her father and her husband. The undesired breakup of her marriage triggered by the unforeseen death of her father forced her to search for consolation through the relationship with her camera. This medium, implanted in her by her cinematographer father becomes her witness, therapist and redeemer. “While Aneta reexamines her life, a terrifying truth comes to the surface. She recognises how oblivious she was to the fact that her once beloved husband is in reality a sexual predator and brainwashing cult leader. Aneta uses her right as the filmmaker to claim the narrative and liberate herself from the influence of false personas,” add the project notes.
It was never Ptak’s intention to make a film about her father as an artist, but rather a film about him as her father, and to delve deeper into the relationship she had with him. “I also started working on this film because I just needed to do something with my energy and I needed to do something with myself. It was kind of a way of dealing with intense stress and grief. And from the very beginning, I wanted to express myself through this film,” admits Ptak. “I wanted to connect with him through this process, and I wanted to be close to him. I wanted to get him back in a way.”
Ptak met her closest collaborators, producer Malgorzata Starón and creative supervisor Wojciech Staroń, at the funeral of Polish filmmaker Grzegorz Królikiewicz. “[This meeting] pushed me into this whole process… It’s not very typical [in terms of] how movies are made, to be honest. And we’ve already been doing it for so many years just because it is so difficult for me. Gosia [Starón] the producer, gave me a lot of freedom, space and time that I needed. And I know that from the very beginning, she wanted to help me express myself,” says Ptak of the collaboration.
The project participated at Doc Lab Poland and the pair pitched Birdie at the Krakow Film Festival in August 2019. But back then, the story was very different from what it is today. “A few years after my father had passed, I started realizing slowly that my ex-husband is a cult leader. He’s a sexual predator. He’s a brainwashing and abusive person. So, it took me a few years to decide that I wanted to talk about [this aspect of my life] in the film,” shares Ptak, adding she received two gifts from her father. “The first gift was the gift of a camera. When I was a teenager, he got me a camera for my birthday, and I started documenting and filming my life. But also, his death was a gift to me. It was a curse, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.”
The decision to include this part of her life in the film stems from the Ex Oriente workshop. “It was a very intense process. Before, I was too intimidated, too shy, but also too scared. In the process of participating, I decided to be sincere and not to censor myself,” explains Ptak.
The director is opting for a very subjective and emotional style. “When you see the material, you can see that it was shot from the perspective of somebody who’s an insider, of somebody who’s under the influence of whatever is happening over there. And what you need to also take into consideration is that this material was not shot for a documentary. It was just a way of self-expression. During my life, I have been filming whatever was around me like a way of dealing with my emotions. I did not think about a movie when I was filming it,” says Ptak. “So, the visual style of the of the film is more an intuitive choice, not a conscious one.”
