Kill It and Leave This Town

Mariusz Wilczynski’s astonishing debut feature is a deeply personal, hand drawn animation, over a decade in the making. The dreamlike images are exorcising ghosts from his past growing up in Lodz during the communist era in 1970s Poland. The town is full of alienated souls, literary characters, comic book heroes, family and friends who wander through a gloomy, industrial labyrinth, enacting scraps of memories and dreams. A dark, surrealist satire, the film conjures nightmarish images from scratchily inked scraps of paper, orchestrated in an expansive and unique cinematic style.

‘All my films are connected in some way. There are certain recurring motifs, such as girls with pink bows in their hair. My fascination with dimensions we know and those we don’t is always present in my films. Contemporary science says there are 11 dimensions, that’s truly mind-boggling. My films are poetic. A characteristic feature of poetry is its ambiguity, everyone can interpret a poem differently. I try to make my films in this way, leaving the message open to interpretation. A glass can mean a glass and a galaxy at the same time, though, of course, you need to avoid chaos. If I were a poet, I’d be able to talk about my films but because I’m not, I’m sometimes a bit afraid to talk about them.’

Mariusz Wilczynski, Director