Zima

The title of Kasumi Ozeki and Tomasz Popakul’s Zima translates as ‘winter.’

It is the time of year that this hugely expressive animation takes place, in a secluded coastal village – but the coldness and hardness that permeate the film are as spiritual as they are seasonal. The people of the village range from the taciturn to the violently hostile, an unremitting life shaping tough, unrelenting people. Amongst this populace is Anka (voiced by Nina Michnik and Anna Pyrka at different ages), who the film depicts both as a girl and a young woman, a more sensitive soul struggling to navigate her harsh environs.

We first meet Anka in a heavy metal-inflected prologue in which she gently tends to some newly born kittens before her father scoops them up in a sack and heads for the river where the two have a menacing standoff. The film uses animals throughout – symbolically and literally – to aid in its central conceit of needling at the wound of our ability as a species to be callous and caring in the same breath. The imperfect shapes and coarsely scrawled lines of the hand-drawn animation imbue the images with a similarly contradictory essence; one that in a single moment can seem to represent the diligent attention of the animation process and the carelessness of a crude sketch.

What the febrile and impressionistic nature of the animation also does is infuse every frame of Zima with, at times overwhelming, feeling. Spiky lines and morphing bodies create an urgent energy in a sledging sequence, the chalky highlights on the face of Anka’s father seem to glow with the warmth of the fire, and the roughly depicted eye of an animal transpires to actually be the island in the snow created by a dog chained to his shelter and pacing in circles at the end of his tether. In a film primarily cast in monochrome, splashes of colour are also achingly impactful – from the red of a thermometer charting their descent into winter or the ominously pink sky over the sea ice as Anka and her friend go skating at dusk. Beneath the surface they come across the bodies of cats, trapped in the frost, and we’re reminded of the bleak reality underlying even the most elegant of moments.

Directors: Kasumi Ozeki, Tomasz Popakul
Cast: Nina Michnik, Anna Pyrka, Bartosz Bielenia, Stanislaw Juskulka
Producers: Marcin Podolec
Screenplay, editing: Tomasz Popakul
Sound: Michal Fojcik
Animation: Tomek Popakul, Jakub Baniak, Alicja B?aszczy?ska, Micha? Orzechowski, Olga K?yszewicz
Production company: Yellow Tapir Films (Poland)
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Animated Film)
In Polish
26 minutes