Today's female director for our Female Filmmakers series is a spicy one. She's super relevant and she has directed a lot of highly sexual scenes. She's also just getting started. Let's talk about Polish director Barbara Bialowas whom you might know better as the mind behind the 365 Days movies on Netflix. Yep! Those were directed by a woman! Let's take a look.
Barbara Bialowas was born in Opole, Poland, in 1978. Barbara looks like a Polish model, despite being someone who likes to stay behind the camera. She is tall, lean, and brunette with high cheekbones and hauntingly beautiful brown eyes. Not a lot is known about her personal life, but the Polish beauty knows how to capture sex on film and she has already done it a lot in her short career.
She did act once, in the 2000 film Angelus as Angel, but she focused on writing and directing shortly thereafter. She has written and directed a lot of her own work starting with the short documentary Moscow Wife in 2006. She then directed a few more short films and a TV movie before she made her feature film debut which did indeed have three nude scenes. Now that's what I like to see!
In 2012, she directed Big Love which was the first time we started to see how sexual her work could really be. The plot follows a teenager named Emilia played by Aleksandra Hamkalo who meets a twentysomething dude who inspires her to leave her parent's house and run away with him. He encourages her to pursue her musical dreams and in no time at all Emilia is a rising singer. However, fame threatens the relationship that inspired her to follow her dreams in the first place. As her star rises, their love fades. Sad! But, hey, there are great sex scenes.
I have to say that some of these shots are stunning. Look at this highly saturated still, for example. The colors are gorgeous and Aleksandra's breasts are well lit while the man's body is much more obscured by the shadows. The composition and coloring in this scene is truly gorgeous, showing that Barbara is not just out for smut. She is making beautiful films.
In 2020, Barbara Bialowas was given the reigns to make 365 Days. She adapted the plot from a Blanka Lipinska novel with her co-creator Tomasz Mandes who helped direct this one. This is the only film she had a co-director for. The plot is wild: a Sicilian mob boss falls for a Polish woman on a working holiday in Italy. He kidnaps her and makes a deal with her that she has a year to fall in love with him, basically living as his sex slave, and if she does not fall for him after a year then she can leave. Um...what? YES. That's how the movie begins. From there, it's all sex.
With FIVE nude scenes, Barbara proved that she could deliver a lot more with a bigger budget (thank you, Netflix). And by "more" we mean sex scenes. It is very clear that that is what interests Barbara most. She clearly cares about love and passion, but she definitely emphasizes the passion part. Barbara is basically making movies that feel like erotic novels, complete with bonkers plots that have loads of sex.
The Polish woman is played by Anna Maria Sieklucka who feels like she could be a stand-in for Barbara. The brunette beauty shows off her pink nipples and ample ass in several different scenes that left us wanting more. I could watch these every day for a year and still not be tired of watching Anna Maria go nude in 365 Days. Take this scene, for example. This is just one of the multiple lengthy scenes with shows off Anna Maria's nude body:
Anna Maria reprises her role in 2022 for the film's spicy sequel. The Netflix sequel 365 Days: This Day follows up on the former captive who is now married to the mob boss, but she struggles to be the wife of a mafioso. She copes with sex...lots of it! Is the title clunky? Yes, but who cares! By now you should know that if you are tuning into a 365 Days movie, it's about the sex and not about the logic. In fact, the logic IS sex.
The sex scenes are long and numerous, like this kinky kitchen scene in which Anna Maria looks like a snack as she crawls across a table in her black lingerie to seduce her man. In no time at all, her bra has been pulled down as he goes down on her while she lays back on the kitchen table. It looks like dinner has been served!
These sex scenes are INSANE. They are so long, so softcore, and so well-done that it's hard to believe that these are not real sex scenes. How did Barbara do it? It's clear that her actors really trust her to do multiple long - and I mean LONG - scenes like these! That requires a lot of dedication, talent, and hard work...and it makes us hard watching it.
According to IMDB, Barbara wanted the sex scenes to be so authentic that the audience could hear the actors' heavy breathing and moans. The crew was minimal so not to make any distractions for the actors. While there are rumors that these scenes are real, they are not. They have all been heavily simulated, but they could have fooled me!
This film was only just released a week ago, so Barbara Bialowas is enjoying post-movie release bliss. She does not have anything next on her docket, but there is no doubt that she will deliver another sexy film in no time at all. Let's just hope she aims to outdo herself!
