02/09/2009

Poland’s Tomasz Bagiński – previously nominated for an Oscar for best animated short for Cathedral in 2003 and winner of Bafta for Fallen Art in 2006 – will be presenting his new work Kinematograph in the shorts competition ‘Corto Cortissimo’ at the 66th Venice Film Festival.

Adapted from a comic strip taken from Mateusz Skutnik’s Revolutions series, Kinematograph is the story of a modest inventor who builds a machine that projects moving images in the days before the Lumière brothers. Bagiński’s third short – the production of which involved 50 animators from the Studio Platige Image – is a sort of fairytale for adults, endowed with great suggestive and poetic power, the story of the cinematograph inventor serving as a pretext for talking about love, passion and sacrifice. As the director points out, the aim was to move the audience and he imposed this romantic formula to test out his skills before getting started in features with the Hardkor 44 project.

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Despite being only 12 minutes long, Kinematograph is a very rich work with interlocking relationships between many of its characters. With an elaborate setting, the film, scripted by the director himself, was animated by graphic designer Kuba Jabłoński. With Platige Images planning to catalogue studio productions, this would allow Kinematograph to hit screens in the autumn.

(Translated from French)