King Matt the First (Król Maciuś Pierwszy, 2019–2025) is an intimate, sensitive portrait of childhood, sisterhood, and coming of age in today’s world, that is, a world overshadowed by wars, a pandemic, and a hostile culture. Jaśmina Wójcik and her partner, cinematographer Jakub Wróblewski, follow their daughters Zoja and Lea as they play, talk, and argue, capturing the fleeting process through which young people form their identities and sense of agency – a process that ordinarily eludes adults and the culture they dominate.

Jaśmina Wójcik’s non-linear narrative, which evokes the ghosts of our own childhoods, combined with Jakub Wróblewski’s sensuous images, full of soft summer light, Agata Chodyra’s polyphonic, immersive sound design, and Dominik Strycharski’s music, creates an extraordinary film that gets under the skin, smells of the forest and hay, and tastes like wild strawberries. The spontaneous conversations between Zoja and Lea are at times touching and at others unsettling. Is it possible that children can talk to each other with such maturity? And should we, adults, be listening in on their intimate conversations? Jaśmina Wójcik adds one more question: What can we learn from children when we finally begin listening to them with genuine attention?

King Matt the First is also a record of constant transformation, a testimony to the fact that childhood and adolescence are not a single unchanging period or a cohesive whole, but a series of bodily experiences, fragmentary moments, fragile alliances, and kaleidoscopic identities, continually reassembling themselves from a handful of coloured fragments: temperament, emotions, books, nature, conversations, parents, and peers. In King Matt almost nothing remains fixed – there is only time, quivering and stretched out.

The director describes King Matt the First as a creative documentary for several reasons. First, it was partly inspired by reading Janusz Korczak’s book, in which the most important social roles are played not by adults but by children. Second, the screenplay was created over the course of several years based on the creative choreographic workshops that the director conducted with children she knew and on real overheard conversations between Lea and Zoja. Third, the very act of filming a family’s private everyday life inevitably transforms that everyday reality. In a companion book titled Czy jak będę dorosła, będę pamiętała, jak to jest być dzieckiem (When I’m an Adult, Will I Remember What It’s Like to Be a Child?), Zoja Wróblewska recalls the making of the film in the following words: “It was long. Long, but not tiring, at least not for me and Lea. I don’t remember everything. I sometimes have the feeling that I do remember something, but I’m not sure if I didn’t just see it in the film.” Rather than simply reproducing reality in the manner conventionally associated with documentary, King Matt also helped shape that reality, affecting not only its protagonists and their parents (the director and cinematographer), but also its audience and their culturally constructed notions of childhood as a less significant and less serious period of life than adulthood.

In her artistic and educational practice, Jaśmina Wójcik – like the author of the book King Matt was based on, the prewar Polish-Jewish educator Janusz Korczak (the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit) – often gives voice to children and calls for them to be treated with attention and respect. For this reason, from 2021 to 2026 she served as editor-in-chief of the magazine Gazeta Dzieci (The Children’s Gazette), created exclusively by children and young people, who were free to decide which topics to address and what material to publish. With the support of Eliza Urwanowicz-Rojecka, Justyna Kołodko-Bietkał, and Katarzyna Kida from Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, the magazine involved not only children from Polish primary and secondary schools but also young people from Poland’s Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities. The project was inspired by the children’s magazine Mały Przegląd (The Little Review), which Janusz Korczak led before the war. Based on Korczak’s ideas and her own method of working with children, Jaśmina Wójcik issued her Manifest of Empathetic Education (Manifest Edukacji Empatycznej). In addition to Janusz Korczak, she lists Maria Montessori, Ken Robinson, Arno Stern, André Stern, and Rudolf Steiner among her role models.

In her empathetic projects the artist and director works not only with children but also with adults – particularly those who are neglected by the system and underprivileged. Her previous feature-length creative documentary titled The Symphony of the Ursus Factory (Symfonia Fabryki Ursus, 2018) focuses on the former workers of the Ursus factory in Warsaw, which produced tractors and other farming machinery between 1893 and 2003. During a five-year-long choreographic and ethnographic process, Jaśmina Wójcik (in collaboration with choreographer Rafał Urbacki and composer Dominik Strycharski) reconstructed the protagonists’ memories of their former work and also the everyday gestures they performed on the production lines. The stunning, suggestive film that was the result of this process filled a narrative and symbolic gap in official forms of historical commemoration, brought back to life an old community, and became for its members a source of private emotion and public pride. It has been screened at IFFR Rotterdam, Hot Docs in Toronto (where it won a main prize), DOK Leipzig, DOC NYC, RIDM, and Millennium Docs Against Gravity, among other festivals. It was also nominated for the Cinema Eye Honors award and a Polish Film Award.

King Matt the First had its international premiere at the Hot Docs festival in Canada. In 2025, it received an honourable mention in the Polish Competition at the international Millennium Docs Against Gravity film festival.

Anna Wandzel