Still from Jarosław Konopka's "Underlife"
With Polish film animation celebrating its 65th anniversary, the 2nd International Stop Motion Festival in Recife, Brazil, presents four Polish animations in the festival's main competition and dedicates a section to Polish puppet animation.
In a seemingly ordinary city, inhabitants suffer from a serious condition: they are headless. Nevertheless, their condition doesn't seem to bother them much. They walk in haste and chaos around the town, stumbling and falling all the time and creating a mindless, intolerant community. In the anonymous urban mass one man stands out, Danny Boy, who feels strongly alienated and lonely. In the privacy of his home, he constructs a machine to help bring his solitude to an end. Director Marek Skrobecki’s Danny Boy, a Polish-Swiss production from 2010, was nominated for the prestigious Cartoon d’Or in Brussels, and received awards in Kraków and Bydgoszcz in Poland, and in Nenzing, Austria, and Montecatini, Italy.
Also competing in festival competition is director Eliza Płocieniak-Alvarez's Oczko / Ladder. A video clip to a song by the group Mikromusic from Wrocław, Ladder won Best Videoclip at the Cartón festival in Buenos Aires. Krzysztof Szafraniec’s Skrzydła 3D / Wings 3D, a puppet-animation created with stereoscopic photography to music by the band Psio Crew, plays with paintings of the folk artist and primitivist painter Nikifor Krynicki, who became famous in his late life after decades during which his work was underestimated.
The fourth film presented in festival competition is Jarosław Konopka’s Underlife. Inspired by composer and jazz pianist Krzysztof Komeda’s piece Kołysanka / Lullaby, the animation explores ancestral influence on today’s generations. The baby carriage symbolises time and place of birth and constitutes the leading motif in Underlife, which asks whether a human can be liberated from from subconscious determinants.
The Special Stop Motion section dedicated to the 65th anniversary of Polish animation presents 16 films from the 1940s to recent productions. Zenon Wasilewski’s Za Krola Krakusa / In the Time of King Krakus, from 1947, is the first film by the Polish animation studio Se Ma For, a puppet film depicting dragon challenges faced by King Krakus and his court. Walerian Borowczyk's Szkoła / The School from 1959 is an expression of protest against military routine in which a man, always prepared in a uniform with a rifle, depicts humanity stripped of individual personality.
Two others among the 16 screenings are Izabela Plucinska's Afternoon and Przemysław Adamski and Katarzyna Kijek’s Noise. Afternoon captures a moment in the life of a man and a woman who are completely disengaged from one another's lives. Noise, based on Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley' theoretical work, shows how familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of the perceiver, their existences generating individual noises.
Organised since 2011, the Brasil Stop Motion Festival in Recife began in 2011 and is one of the three biggest festivals dedicated to puppet animation and stop-motion animations, along with the Canadian Montreal Stop Motion and the Polish-Slovenian Stoptrip festivals.
For more information see: 2nd International Brazil Stop Motion Festival
Sources: culture.pl, Polish Shorts, Reelport, Semafor,
Melbourne International Animation Festival
Editor: Marta Jazowska