Izabela Plucińska – Career Honor at Imaginaria 2024
The complete retrospective of the award-winning and talented Polish animator will be presented: 15 works, created in claymation, i.e. stop-motion animation with plasticine – a material that the author has always used with great skill -, where everyday life and the dreamlike dimension alternate surprisingly.
Izabela Plucińska began her training at the Łódź Film School, where she made three short films: Backyard (1999), Dubler (Twin, 2001) and Po drugiej stronie (On the Other Side, 2002). These are works in which his approach to plasticine is outlined, modeled into deliberately imprecise figures that allow the characters to change their forms, in a space and time where reality and suggestion merge.
In 2005, after winning a scholarship that allowed her to move to Germany and study at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, she graduated with the short film Jam Session, based on the play of the same name by Maciej Zenon Bordowicz, with which she conquered the Silver Bear in the Short Film Competition of the Berlinale, thus starting to attract the attention of various international festivals such as the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and the Warsaw Film Festival.
In 2006 you founded ClayTraces, an independent production company, together with Jamila Wenske: since then you have made around ten short films which show, over the years, a growing maturity in the use of a material as tangible as it is difficult. A fixed chamber, a glass top, and traces in the plasticine which, when heated between the fingers that model it, are shaped into bas-reliefs and two-dimensional figures. One of the subjects that has always accompanied Izabela Plucińska’s filmography is the life of a couple, made up of tenderness, irony, intimacy but also of arguments and obstacles. His “trilogy of everyday life” composed of Sniadanie (Breakfast, 2006), Popoludnie (Afternoon, 2012) and Abend (Evening, 2016) is the representation of how the normality of a relationship can, through unpredictable events, bring to light the true meaning of sharing and love. This aspect is taken to the extreme in Sexy Laundry (Bucato Sexy, 2016), which ironically recounts the original attempt of a couple to try to relive, after twenty-five years of marriage, the sexual enthusiasm of the early days.
Other films such as 7 More Minutes (2007), Marathon (2008) – co-directed together with Špela Čadež, Career Honor at Imaginaria 2018 – and the medium-length film Esterhazy (2009) are the representation of a dream dimension: the characters move in a reality immersed in a suspended time, initially distressed and then completely free from any worries.
During these months of the pandemic, Izabela dedicated herself to the creation of a new short film which allowed her to approach a technique new to her, namely the traditional charcoal drawing: 98kg explores, against a background of a penetrating red, the theme of domestic violence experienced by a woman at the hands of her husband, a toxic trap where those 98 kilos are the weight of the violence she is forced to suffer. For her latest work Joko (selected to Main Competition in this edition of Imaginaria) she has re-adopted the novel Joko fête son anniversaire by Roland Topor, an illustrator and playwright who has already drawn inspiration for her Portrait en Pied de Suzanne (Standing Portrait of Suzanne, 2019). Kafkaesque narratives that bend exceptionally to the style of Izabela Plucińska, winking at Jan Švankmajer, one of the masters who has always inspired her filmography.
With the patronage of the Polish Institute of Rome and in collaboration with ClayTraces and Krakow Film Foundation.
The complete retrospective:
Joko, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, 2024, 15′
Portrait of Suzanne, Poland/Germany/France, 2019, 14’53’
Sexy laundry, Poland/Canada/Germany, 2016, 12′ 03”
Evening, Poland/Germany, 2016, 2’30”
Darling, Poland/Germany, 2013, 7’03”
Afternoon, Poland/Germany, 2012, 2’38”
Josette and Her Daddy, Germany, 2010, 8′
Esterhazy, Poland/Germany, 2009, 24’49”
Marathon, Poland/Germany, 2008, 5’11”
7 More Minutes, Poland/Germany, 2007, 7’42”
Breakfast, Poland, 2006, 2’19”
Jam Session, Poland/Germany, 2005, 9’31”
On The Other Side, Poland, 2002, 4’25”
Twin, Poland, 2001, 3’19”
Backyard, Poland, 1999, 2’29”
