GUEST COUNTRY: POLAND

In search of the roots of Polish animated film one has to go back to 1910 when Wladyslaw Starewicz, an amateur entomologist born in 1882 to a Polish-Lithuanian family in Moscow, began experimenting with the technique of stop-motion photography by filming a fight between two stag-beetles, and then in 1912 started making the puppet films for which he would become famous around the world. Although between the wars there was a number of animators (of whom a couple of avant-garde filmmakers Stefan and Franciszka Themerson deserve a special mention) who with various degree of success struggled to keep Polish animation alive, it was not until 1947 that the production of animated films in this country got its momentum. The first state owned studios were established and the number of films produced by them would gradually increase in following years reaching its peak in the 1980s. The Golden Age of Polish animation stretches from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s when animators like Jan Lenica, Walerian Borowczyk, Daniel Szczechura, Miroslaw Kijowicz, Kazimierz Urbański, Stefan Schabenbeck, Ryszard Czekala, and Jerzy Kucia scored an impressive number of awards at international film festivals, including the Grand Prix for “House” by Lenica and Borowczyk at the International Experimental Film Competition in Brussels in 1958 and the Grand Prix for “Roll Call” by Czekala in Annecy in 1971. One should also not forget an Oscar for “Tango” by Zbigniew Rybczynski in 1983 and Piotr Dumala’s successes from 1985 on. Despite economical problems that have shaken the film industry since 1989, a younger generation of animators keeps making films which continue the best tradition of Polish animation and are being noticed at film festivals all over the world. A list of names worth to remember include: Mariusz Wilczyński, Marek Skrobecki, Malgorzata Bosek, Wioletta Sowa, Tomasz Baginski and many others. (Marcin Gizycki)