Kill It and Leave This Town
Totally unique animation film – wonderful, tender, unexpectedly touching, grim and dark – in which Mariusz Wilczynski tells about his childhood in the industrial city of Lodz.
For his first feature-length animated film, Mariusz Wilczyński has turned his attention to his own biography and bares all. Rummaging irreverently and uninhibitedly through his own personal and collective memory, he populates the streets, trams, and shops of the industrial city of Lodz with characters, scraps of memory and catchy tunes that take us back to his childhood world of the 1960s and 1970s. Literary characters, comic book heroes, family members and friends wander anachronistically through this gloomy labyrinth, comforting the protagonist and defying darkness and oblivion. Wilczyński pushes the style and poetry of his shorter films, which oscillate between children’s drawings and Gothic aesthetics, to the extreme, testing the limits of what can be projected by using every imaginable nuance between grey and black. The cinema becomes a cave in which the audience can give free rein to their own memories, too, and face them with wide open eyes.