When Polish filmmaker Bogna Kowalczyk first met the 82-year-old drag artist who features in her documentary Boylesque (screening in Hot Docs’ International Spectrum), Lula was still not yet really famous. He was performing at private parties. At the time, Kowalczyk was planning to make a film about male burlesque performers.
“What was interesting to me was men taking part in the dialogue about sexuality and gender identity. I was curious…because I saw a lot of women doing that,” the director remembers the original motivation behind her film. She soon decided that the venerable Lula would be an ideal subject.
Lula lived in a post-Soviet block of flats, with “concrete, greyish corridors, polished by hundreds of thousands of feet – so they are very shiny and very sad.” Before their first meeting, he had put out tea lights in the corridors so Kowalczyk could find his apartment. “That was the moment I realised this person likes to play with reality…I like it!”
Her subject was “a person of paradoxes.” On the surface, he seemed very friendly and easy going. “This is how he shows up. He is very easy to talk to, very young in the soul. He talks very interestingly. It’s very pleasurable,” the director reflects on spending time in Lula’s presence. However, she soon also discovered that he was also a very private and closed personality.
“Of course, I enjoyed his company [but] I really like authenticity. I am seeking the stuff that is behind the small talk…the real conversations, when we talk about what we fear, what we dream of. I like it in my personal life. Exactly the same thing happened here. I saw this very interesting person with an amazing history but I was curious – who are you really?”
Lula had endured tough times in Soviet-era Poland, not a welcoming environment for flamboyant drag queens. He soon realised that Kowalczyk was trying to make a multi-layered portrait of him, one touching on death, grief and growing old. That idea appealed to him. “I trust you, let’s do it,” he told the director.
Kowalczyk set out to make a dynamic, fast moving film. This may be a documentary about an old man but she wanted it to have a zestful, youthful spirit. It talks about “sex, love, how to squeeze [the most from] life, to drink up every droplet. And we knew we had to make it [the film] pretty.”
The director pays tribute to the intuitive skills of her cinematographer, Milosz Kasiura. It helped, too, that Lula’s “energy was very quick.” Lula is a performer and Kowalczyk was keen to celebrate his showmanship.
In her own work, Kowalczyk has always been adventurous. She is not “tied” to any specific technique. Her earlier documentary Vanilla Whip, about BDSM, was animated. “It was about something very sensitive, that people were ashamed of, and so I wanted to hide their faces because I thought it would be more authentic.” She approached Boylesque in the same freewheeling, irreverent fashion, making sure that she “used every frame and every second.” She trusts her viewers to understand what she is trying to achieve with her sometimes oblique use of sound and visual language.
Kowalczyk is a graduate of the Lodz Film School. Alongside her docs, she works on pop promos and commercials. By her own admission, her approach is very individualistic. “My documentary language? I am best at being me. I would be the worst at being somebody else! I guess with this [Boylesque], it’s a huge improvisation. It’s a mix of everything I experienced along the way – that I liked, I watched, I experienced and I felt…I am very curious and non-judgmental.”
“What I and main producer Tomasz Morawski like about this film is that it shows a person, not just an old person, not just an LBTGQ person, but a person who is facing many obstacles, but always gets back on his feet again,” executive producer Katarzyna Kuczyńska, of Haka Films told Business Doc Europe when the project was pitched in Krakow in 2020. The film will soon show during Krakow 2022 where Lula himself (who hasn’t made it to Hot Docs) is expected to be in attendance.
