Still from Warsaw 1935, photo: Neborn.
Pre-war Warsaw with its old townhouses, elegant cars and trams was a city once touted as a Paris of the East. The 3-D animated film Warsaw 1935 brings it back to its pre-Second World War splendour.
Creating a picture of Warsaw from the interwar period, Warsaw 1935 meticulously rebuilds streets and buildings destroyed during the war and re-creates the atmosphere of the city. Made over the span of four years from archival material, the film is a 20-minute digitally reconstructed production. Created by the Warsaw-based special effects studio Newborn, its makers comment on the production,
Apart from the use of 3-D technology on a giant scale, much effort was needed for the collection of documentation, the reconstruction of architectural forms and the atmosphere only from available photographs. The remaking of the cars, trams and carriages from those times also required reference material which weren’t easily accessible and required long searches and analysis. The most useful source of information turned out to be the website of Warsaw aficionados www.warszawa1939.pl. Additionally, the National Archive enabled the retrieval of unique photographs of buildings and streets.
Warsaw 1935 is reminiscent of another multimedia project that restores Warsaw to its old past. Damian Nenow’s City of Ruins: Warsaw 1945 reconstructs a flight by a B-24 Liberator bomber of the type that had dropped aid packages for city residents during the Uprising, showing a bird's-eye view of the destroyed, largely abandoned city in the spring of 1945. That 3-D film offers surreal, life-like experience of the war-shattered city from above, and can be viewed at the Warsaw 1944 Rising Museum.
Warsaw 1935 appears in cinemas across Poland on the 15th of March 2013.
Sources: Polish language article for culture.pl, culture.pl
Editor: Marta Jazowska