Weronika Szyma

A cat lover, Jesus leaving the cross and Christmas carollers holding pitchforks are set against a snowy and icy scenery. ‘Zima’, a psychodelic journey to a small fishing village, collects as if in a lens the behaviour, customs and vices of the Polish provinces. In this small community, different views, the behaviour of people and animals and their mutual relations clash like ice floes on a lake. Maintained in the convention of magic realism, this animation is like a horror playing out to the accompaniment of barking dogs and a punk metal music score.

The sea on whose shore Weronika Szyma has set her film is a dense, pulsating blue. The beach and the family who are staying there, meanwhile, are limited to delicate black and white line drawings. Their minimalism makes the blue stand out all the more enchantingly: Sometimes represented as a horizontal strip that promises freedom but also fuels insecurity. Sometimes sloshing diagonally across the screen, swallowing up the image completely for a brief moment and marking a caesura. And there are quite a number of caesuras, because the seven film minutes span the story of several generations.

A young girl goes to a psychologist to tell him a story of her weird phobia of cats and dogs. A strange tale about bloody quadruped, cats that appear as tigers and dachshunds who are professional karate fighters seems a little unbelievable to the doctor. (from Vimeo page)

A girl is in love with a Palestinian boy and goes to Israel for the first time. Her simplified vision of the world and the desire to take sides in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are quickly confronted with the reality of living on the border of Sderot and the Gaza Strip.

This poetic dialogue unfolds between a young girl and her deceased great-grandfather, intertwining images from a German town where he was sent to a work camp during World War II with a delicate narrative as the girl pens a letter. The past seamlessly blends with the present, and flashes of memory mix with moments of oblivion.

A glance into the mirror encourages a young woman to gradually discover her carnality.