Polish Film Festival

KILL IT AND LEAVE THIS TOWN

2019 / 88 minutes / Poland
In Polish with English subtitles

Not Rated

Streaming

Sunday, April 11, 2021

Zabij to i wyjedź z tego miasta

A remarkable 14 years in the making, this beguiling and curious film was hand-drawn by Wilczynski, who is an artist and animator by trade. The story is semi-autobiographical, encompassing a variety of emotions the director had after losing his parents.

Fleeing from despair after losing those dearest to him, the hero hides in a safe land of memories, where time stands still and all those dear to him are alive. Over the years, a city grows in his imagination. One day, literary heroes and cartoon childhood idols, who in the consciousness of the successive generations are forever young and wearing short pants, come to live there, uninvited. When our hero discovers they have all grown old and that eternal youth does not exist, he decides to return to real life, and the amazing characters living in his imagination lead him back to the real world.

Poland’s official Oscar submission in Best Animated Feature category 

“… it is raw, rough, fragmented, angry, often brilliant with its own kind of aesthetic brusquery and pain. Wilczyński serves up brutal images, often drawn on lined paper, for all the world as if that was the only thing to hand when he decided to spill his imaginative guts.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian 

“Mariusz Wilczynski’s terrifying first animated feature, Kill It and Leave This Town…. depict(s) a world of monstrous inhumanity and devastating interpersonal cruelty — hell, in short.”– Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter 

“this surreal and striking animation… [is] so personal and handmade that it almost bears fingerprints… a work of entrancing low-fi artistry and deeply felt emotion” -Sarah Ward, Screen International