This animation is based on a sonnet created by Adam Mickiewicz in the summer of 1825. The famed poet had just visited Akerman, a district town of Bessarabia on the banks of the Dniester estuary, and its haunting surrounding area. The resulting ‘The Akkerman Steppe’ became the introduction – and the key – to his collection The Crimean Sonnets, published a little later, after Mickiewicz’s trip to Crimea. At this point, he was a disgraced exiled poet who had just been released from a Vilnius prison.
The creators of this animated film, Liza Skvortsova and Ilia Yudovich, were struck by the silence that opens the sonnet. Silence also captured the hero of the poem – piercing and powerful like a dry ocean, full of other life and movement – and carries him and us away from the daily hustle and bustle, from the petty frustrations of the day...
Animation: Liza Skvortsova & Ilia Yudovich
Drawings: Lilia Niauri
Sound: Artem Fadeev
Translation: Sean Gasper Bye
Narrator: Eamon Cullagh
Idea & production: Anna Mirkes-Radziwon & Sergei Hannolainen