1970

This original film is structured around audio recordings of telephone calls in which Polish government officials communicated with each other during a tense political situation from 1970. The trigger of the conflict that made people take to the streets was an increase in the price of meat in the midst of an already economically difficult situation. Politicians had no better idea than to simply send the police to break up the demonstrations. Wolski obtained the audio recordings of these conversations between those officials and used stop-motion animation to make them come alive, turning each of these political figures into cartoonish versions of themselves.
Although the number of characters at times may disorient the viewer, Wolski creates an unavoidable tension with regards to a demonstration that will spread to several cities through the country. Wolski adds crude newsreel images to the animation scenes in gloomy government halls that give a clearer and more direct account of the concrete consequences of these conversations. The film perfectly captures the distance between these plastic creatures who give orders and the real people who suffer them. (Diego Lerer)

Tomasz Wolski: SILENCE (2003, K), IF I WERE A FISH (2004, K), KLINIKA (2006, K), GOLDFISH (2008), DOCTORS (2011), PALACE (2012), CÓRKA (2015, K), FESTIWAL (2017, Co-Director), A PROBLEM (2020, K), AN ORDINARY COUNTRY (2020)