Mariusz Wilczyński's Zabij to i wyjedź z tego miasta | Kill It and Leave This Town (2020)

Famously, Faulkner uses these two sentences in his novel Requiem for a Nun: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' Similarly, ‌in this animated film these words appear (as subtitles): 'Everyone who has gone, has gone. They haven’t died, they’re still alive in my imagination, including my parents, to this day.' Wilczyński's autobiographical film very much concerns his dead parents, his memories of them at different stages both in his and their lives. It's also hallucinatory, violent, surreal and disturbing. Animals frequently appear, there's an obsession with flies, his parents' heads turn into birds' heads, perspective is changed, a boat on the sea becomes a toy boat in a bath, the film maker takes on a huge size compared with other objects or people, etc. This film, set in the industrial landscape of Łódź, took Wilczyński fourteen years to make, and seems to be an act of love. At one point a representation of his mother, close to death, asks him what the film's about, and he finds it difficult to answer.