31/10/2023 - Prague-born Slovak director Matej Bobrik returns with an observational documentary about a Nepalese family in Warsaw

Oftentimes, we don’t notice the cracks until the thing breaks down; the same goes for relationships, whether romantic or familial. In Distances, Matej Bobrik’s sophomore feature-length documentary, the family unit is in danger of collapsing onto itself. Shiv, his wife Shushila, and their 13-year son Nikesh have been living in Warsaw for two years, after having moved to Poland from Nepal eight years prior. In the hope of securing a better life and future, Shiv works multiple jobs as a delivery man and taxi driver, hoping the financial support he provides for the family will be enough. On the contrary: tensions brew day by day, as both Nikesh and his mother have a bone to pick with the man of the house. Distances had its world premiere in the Opus Bonum International Competition of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival where it won the award for Best Central and Eastern European Documentary, ten years after his short film The Visit — about a welfare home near the Polish and Belarusian border — won the Silver Eye award at Ji.hlava in 2013.

Bobrik has an eye for outliers and perhaps this has something to do with him being born in 1980s Czechoslovakia; displacement, nostalgia, and the convoluted path towards self-affirmation in a new place form the background of his practice. None of these themes are actually discussed out loud in Distances, but in a way, that makes their presence all the more significant. A less charitable interpretation would focus on the escalating drama between husband and wife fuelled by his supposed infidelities, or on the son’s failing to attend school; however, another way to read the film is to focus on the gaps and the unspoken struggles of immigration.

On the surface, it seems like the Nepalese family in Warsaw have managed to integrate themselves and each of the family members have found their own way to do so. Nikesh has Polish friends, Shiv is very happy to tell every curious customer in his taxi who asks that he likes Poland very much. Shushila, however, is often on the phone to her siblings in Nepal. When she wears a traditional dress to go to the temple, Nikesh reproaches her and tells her that people will make fun of her. Growing up a teenager in Poland, he has little tolerance for the traditions his parents grew up with: the sad truth about displacement is that it hits the youngest the hardest, though it may take them a long time to understand that.

Although Distances is dubbed a time-lapse portrait of a family, more accurately it is the portrait of a dissolution. Because of the way it tracks a separation and a deepening chasm between all three members, it is also a kind of domestic tragedy. There is little warmth left in that home, but we as an audience never get to find out exactly why that is. Since Bobrik shoots in verite style, we also do not know anything about his relationship to the family or how (un)comfortable the filming process might have been. As honest and raw as it feels, witnessing the breakdown of a nuclear family from up close is also quite unnerving. Distances is about how easily things can fall apart and how quickly distances can grow, pushing people who are already at a remove from one another even further apart.

Distances is a Polish production by Koi Studio.