Dzien bez slonca AKA A Day Without Sunshine (1959) Kazimierz Karabasz & Wladyslaw Slesicki

A lonely man wanders the streets of contemporary Warsaw. He reads the daily press, observes women in a beauty salon and follows the action on a film set. In each of the places he is just an observer, not a protagonist. He spends some time playing with a homeless dog, bit it prefers to run after a bitch. The man tries to approach a woman standing in a phone booth queue, but she wants to take care of her own business. A visit to the cinema may be a way to forget about loneliness for a while. Feeding pigeons alone is both sad and pleasant. Only the presence of another lonely Varsovian could ameliorate the situation. The film describes a lonely day of a man in a big city. An anonymous man is a fully-fledged character in terms of acting. The soundtrack of the film, following its mood, is another advantage of this poetic production. The documentary shows the skills of the master of the Polish documentary school – Kazimierz Karabasz and Władysław Ślesicki, with whom Karabasz made two films from the so-called black series of Polish documentary titled Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc (1956) and Ludzie z pustego obszaru (1957). Both of the productions demonstrate his ability to observe the life of the city and its lost residents.