August 19
12:00
Kinomaja Uus 3
Length 65 min
Longing for love, excessive eating, memory loss and BDSM – it’s hard to find a taboo topic uncovered by Izabela Plucinska. The skilful use of clay animation allows all of these to unfold with elegant storytelling, ironic humour and depth of emotion.
After the screening, there will be a conversation with the author of the films.
Izabela Plucińska
Born in Poland and currently living in Germany, Izabela Plucińska has some thirty films to her credit. She studied art and film and now brilliantly combines her talents to create animated works. In 2005, her short “Jam Session” won a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. Since then, this gifted filmmaker has enjoyed a steady stream of projects and successes. Her politically and philosophically oriented medium-length film “Esterhazy” was screened around the world in 2009, including in England, France, Finland, Hungary, and Mexico, garnering a number of awards. At the moment, Plucińska, a Berliner by adoption, is busily working at her own production company, Clay Traces, along with her associates. As a renowned artist, she frequently leads workshops and teaches film animation at universities internationally. Several exhibitions have featured her work. Her last film “Portrait of Suzanne” is based on the novel by Roland Topor.
Afternoon
Director: Izabela Plucińska
Year: 2012
Length: 2:39
Country: Poland, Germany
Production: Izabela Plucińska, Clay Traces
Synopsis:
“Afternoon” is a two-part commentary on one single moment shared by a man and a woman. Although each of them is completely engaged with their own activities and doesn’t seem to notice anything else all of a sudden, owing to an unexpected incident, the couple will look towards one another once again. When the world somehow fades away for a little while they are given the chance of reuniting once again. For how long will this precious moment last?
Abend
Director: Izabela Plucińska
Year: 2016
Length: 2:33
Country: Poland, Germany
Production: Clay Traces
Synopsis:
A man and a woman have obviously run out of words to say to each other – so they take action. He throws her favourite dinnerware out of the window; she smashes his hunting trophy… Furniture, clothes, walls – nothing is safe from them. In Izabela Plucińska’s plasticine animation, the quarrelling couple join forces to smash the whole household to pieces. But can people who argue so passionately really just part at the end of the day?
Darling
Director: Izabela Plucińska
Year: 2013
Length: 7:03
Country: Poland, Germany
Production: Clay Traces, Hauptproductions Film
Synopsis:
What is memory loss? In the labyrinth of fear, a stranger becomes a close person and home turns into a trap. Groping her way down the track of familiar objects and shapes, the character is trying to go back to the life that used to be her own. This clay animation from Izabela Plucińska is a captivating picture of the feeling of being lost and alienated and an attempt at putting the pieces that fail to fit together into a whole.
Portrait of Suzanne
Director: Izabela Plucińska
Year: 2019
Length: 15:17
Country: Poland, Germany, France
Production: Clay Traces
Synopsis:
In a small hotel, there is a man who tries to stop his hunger for love by eating excessively. But his longing for his love, Susanne, will not be soothed by the plates full of meat cuts, vegetables and fruit. When the protagonist goes to the town in search of food, he accidentally hurts his foot, which unexpectedly transforms into Susanne. Since then, they are to be inseparable. Still, this is just the beginning of a surreal story about loneliness, jealousy and love. Every single detail of this grotesque plasticine adaptation of Roland Topor’s short story enchants the audience.
Sexy Laundry
Director: Izabela Plucińska
Year: 2015
Length: 12:02
Country: Poland, Canada, Germany
Production: Clay Traces, National Film Board of Canada, Fundacja Las Sztuki
Synopsis:
How can the flames of desire be rekindled after 25 years of married life? Izabela Plucińska’s erotic comedy, made entirely through the use of modelling clay, delves into the private lives of Alice and Henry, a couple in their fifties numbed by routine, who are holed up in a rococo-kitsch hotel room…
Esterhazy
Director: Izabela Plucińska
Year: 2009
Length: 24:50
Country: Poland, Germany
Production: Donten&Lacroix, Clay Traces
Synopsis:
The hero is a young, purblind and sawn-off bunny Esterhazy from the Esterhazy Dynasty in Vienna. He is sent to Berlin by the Patriarch Count Esterhazy, to find a huge, healthy and beefy bunny woman nearby some mysterious Berlin Wall. After a long, extensive search he finds his paradise (the bunnies’ paradise that existed in reality between the East and West part of the famous Berlin Wall). Esterhazy will move there with the love of his life: Mimi, but as it is 1989 the Berlin Wall comes down… The story describes the most important political event of recent European history – the Fall of the Berlin Wall from an unknown “bunny point of view”. With its humorous keynote, the audience will live through the adventures of the hero-bunny Esterhazy and the upheaval in that special time of European history.