CEE Animation Experience: Kill It and Leave This Town
CEE Animation Experience is a series of masterclasses organized in cooperation with selected partners in the CEE region. This new activity targets animation industry professionals, who will gain new insights as shared by top regional and European experts and get a rewarding experience of film production directly. The first edition will take place on 2 December within the Animateka International Animated Film Festival and is organised by CEE Animation and SPPA – Polish Animation Producers Association. The first activity on our schedule will be a masterclass about the making of the animated feature film Kill It and Leave This Town, hosted by film critic Petra Meterc, who will be talking to the director Mariusz Wilczyński. The programme will be implemented online and open to the public for free.
Kill It and Leave This Town, Mariusz Wilczyński (Bombonierka/Extreme Emotions/Iam – Adam Mickiewicz Institute/EC1 Lodz – City of Culture/Letko/Di Factory/Gigant Films/Polish Film Institute), Poland, 2020, 88′
Fleeing from despair after losing those dearest to him, the hero hides in a safe land of memories, where time stands still and all those dear to him are alive. Over the years, a city grows in his imagination. One day, literary heroes and childhood cartoon idols, who in the consciousness of the successive generations are forever young and wearing short pants, come to live there, uninvited. When our hero discovers they have all grown old and that eternal youth does not exist, he decides to return to real life, and the amazing characters living in his imagination lead him back to the real world.
Mariusz Wilczyński
A self-taught artist who has been creating animated auteur cinema for over twenty years. Retrospectives of his films were held, among others, at MoMA in New York, National Museum of Brasília, Tokyo International Forum, The National Museum in Warsaw and The National Gallery in London. He also realizes improvised live animation performances which he co-creates with symphony orchestras from Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo, Geneva, Lviv and Warsaw. In 2007, the New York Times called him “one of the most important contemporary creators of artistic animation.” For the last 11 years, he has been working on feature animation Kill It and Leave This Town. He is a professor of animation at the Film School in Łódź.
Petra Meterc
Petra is a freelance journalist and film critic, based in Slovenia. For years, she has been writing and reporting on film and literature for one of the oldest independent non-commercial urban radio stations in Europe, Radio Študent. She writes for Ekran magazine for Film and Television and KINO! magazine, as well as other media outlets, mostly focusing on independent cinema, and has contributed to several film festival dailies. She has also worked as a film education mentor and as a mentor of film criticism workshops. She is a Berlinale Talent Press and IFFR Trainee Project for Young Film Critics alumna.