MEN’S CINEMA by GQ Poland
Men’s Cinema by GQ Poland is a signature summer film series presenting contemporary auteur cinema and filmmakers who tell stories about relationships, emotions, identity, ambitions, and the modern world in a uniquely compelling way.
“Men’s” as understood by GQ does not mean genre-based filmmaking or a stereotypical view of masculinity. This is cinema about people, choices, loneliness, intimacy, memory, and the tensions of contemporary life.
The program features films by directors with a distinctive visual language and an auteur perspective: Jim Jarmusch, Paolo Sorrentino, Mariusz Wilczyński, and Park Chan-wook.
KILL IT AND LEAVE THIS TOWN
Age rating: 16+
Winner of the Golden Lions for Best Film at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia.
Mariusz Wilczyński’s animated film “Kill It and Leave This Town” is much more than a film: it is 14 years of life devoted to bringing this remarkable, deeply personal project to the screen. It is a spine-tingling journey into one’s own past and that of the country, a summoning of the ghosts of people and places, a therapeutic story about family, and a moving tribute to friendship. This feature debut by the first Polish animator ever to receive a retrospective at New York’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was born of a need for understanding, forgiveness, and love. Wilczyński’s film resurrects childhood with all its burden of torments and delights, calling forth those who are gone to give them new life. Steeped in details, colors, dialogues, sounds, situations and voices summoned from memory, “Kill It…” becomes a chronicle of a childhood under the Polish People’s Republic and a youth lived through the years of transformation — a story about a changing Poland, about grayness unexpectedly taking on color.
Premiered at the Berlinale and honored at the Annecy festival, “Kill It…” can also boast a cast unlike any other Polish production. Voicing the characters in Wilczyński’s animation are, among others, Barbara Krafftówna, Andrzej Wajda, Irena Kwiatkowska, Krystyna Janda, Gustaw Holoubek, Anna Dymna, Marek Kondrat, Daniel Olbrychski, Magdalena Cielecka, and Małgorzata Kożuchowska. Many of them the director managed to record at the very last moment.
One of the film’s main characters is music: the phenomenal, strikingly contemporary-sounding songs of Tadeusz Nalepa and the band Breakout give the animation a bluesy, unhurried rhythm. The voice of Nalepa, a close friend of Wilczyński’s, resounds here not only in the songs. “Kill It…” was also born of the need to continue a decades-long conversation cut short by the musician’s death. Loved ones still live within us, we still hear the voices of those who came before us — suggests the director, listening with particular attentiveness to the stories of his parents’ generation, marked by the war.
Poetic, surreal, but above all nostalgic and full of empathy for everything that is passing, flawed, and fleeting, “Kill It and Leave This Town” works like a magical incantation with the power to transport us through time. For every viewer, this journey will be a deeply moving, intimate experience.
Directed by: Mariusz Wilczyński
Starring: Andrzej Wajda (voice), Daniel Olbrychski (voice), Małgorzata Kożuchowska (voice), Krystyna Janda (voice), Anna Dymna (voice), Andrzej Chyra (voice), Magdalena Cielecka (voice)
Country of production: Poland
Year of production: 2020
Original language: Polish
Genre: animation
Running time: 88 min
