There should be a law against starting reviews with literary quotes, because it’s pitiable, but apparently, “If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.” That’s what Frances Hodgson Burnett would claim in childhood favourite The Secret Garden. That book was adapted, beautifully, by Polish director Agnieszka Holland. Now, another Pole is heading to the garden: documentary maker Jaśmina Wójcik, who traces the lines of another novel – Janusz Korczak’s King Matt the First.

Written in the 1920s, about a child prince elevated to the throne after his father’s passing, it has aged some, and then again not at all. In Wójcik’s Hot Docs-screened King Matt the First [+lee también:
entrevista: Jaśmina Wójcik
ficha de la película], she doesn’t exactly replicate its wild plot; instead, she follows her two daughters as the young king’s isolation starts mirroring their own. It’s the pandemic, you see. It’s either Zoom or suddenly liberated nature, bursting with colour, which soon devours these girls and anyone watching them. You won’t have seen this kind of green for a while.

They play and they talk – about the old book, which makes a lot of sense to them, but also about the things it describes. Korczak experienced war – we will come back to this later – and so does his little hero. Later, so do these girls’ Ukrainian neighbours. The adults can whisper all they want, but the children will still hear enough to start worrying about the “Third World War”. King Matt the First, the film, often feels timeless, but also very much of its time. How do you grow up, listening to such terrifying news? Then again, wasn’t it always the case?

There’s a lot to unpack: the book, the past and the present. But most of all, it’s a film that puts children first. The adults hold the camera, but that’s all they’re allowed to do. The girls have enough space to do what they feel like doing or say what they feel like saying. It’s all very freewheeling, echoing Korczak’s philosophy without referencing him directly. Which is what we’ll do now: “A child has the right to be themself. They have the right to make mistakes, the right to have their own opinion, the right to respect. There are no children – there are people.”

Still, there’s a melancholy that is hidden away in this touching doc. It comes from the parental stare, worried by the current state of things, and from Korczak’s work – full of tenderness, sure, but also awareness that the world won’t protect children. It won’t protect anybody. During the war, as the principal of an orphanage, he was given a way out. He refused, as the children in his care weren’t offered the same grace. The story goes that on their way to the Treblinka extermination camp, they carried King Matt the First’s flag. Some have refuted it, but as one of Wójcik’s daughters runs around with a shirt on a stick, waving it around, it’s an image that’s hard to let go of.

Andrzej Wajda made a film about Korczak as well – written by Agnieszka Holland, our original garden explorer – and while he also remembered the flag story, he chose to escape into fantasy at one point. Maybe it was just too harsh. Wójcik plays with that, too, when she’s following the girls on the leafy paths. To pay homage to something, you don’t need to quote entire passages or breathe all of the dust in the archives. This isn’t an adaptation, and yet somehow it is, one that’s bound to leave people with a heavy heart, but also with the certainty that spring will come again. After all, it’s already here.

King Matt the First, written by Jaśmina Wójcik and Igor Stokfiszewski, was produced by Poland’s Fixafilm, and its international sales are entrusted to Raina Films.