A director of television programmes, social and artistic animateur and drama instructor, Daniel Banaczek graduated in philosophy from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and from the TV Production Department at the Łódź Film School. He has taken part in the European Social Documentary (ESoDoc) programme run by the ZeLIG School for Documentary, Television and New Media in Bolzano, Italy. For seven years, he has been the director of the highly popular Kuchenne Rewolucje (Kitchen Revolution) for TVN. Prior to that, he made programmes for the Discovery Historia TVN channel, now Discovery Historia, and for Poland’s national television corporation, Telewizja Polska (TVP). Between 1998 and 2005, he designed and completed several dozen social and artistic projects with socially excluded groups; one of those projects was the Radar programme at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). The First Day is his debut documentary, which he began working on in 2004 and finished in 2018.