OSCAR CONTENDER "ACID RAIN" PREMIERES ON VIMEO STAFF PICK
Director Tomek Popakul's ACID RAIN – one of this year's most award-winning animated short films produced by Warsaw-based Animoon premieres on Vimeo Staff Pick on Monday November 18th.
Popakul's innovative animated short film initiated its festival launch premiering at Rotterdam IFF and Sundance Film Festival in January 2019. Since then the film screened at over 60 festivals across the globe including Annecy IAFF, Ottawa IAFF, Nashville IFF, Palm Springs and Denver IFF to list just a few. The film has received 19 awards and its trophies include Grand Prix at Animafest Zagreb, BIAF, Glas Animation and Animest IAFF among others. The film was brought to the US and Canadian screens as a part of Animation Next programme in mid-September. The film qualified for Academy Awards® consideration.
ACID RAIN is set in post-industrial Eastern Europe and follows a young woman who runs away from her depressing hometown. That’s how she meets Skinny – a kind of unstable weirdo who lives in a camper and runs his not-so-legal errands. Their journey gradually leads them towards more and more eerie settings, revealing the attraction and repulsion of rave culture.
„Working on this film, I wanted to depict some very mixed and ambiguous feelings: fascination and repulsion, naive spirituality and „human dirt”, nature and civilisation, crave for colours and grey everyday reality in a post-communist landscape of Eastern Europe, ”says Popakul who is a graduate of the Lodz Film School where he studied screenwriting and animation.
In ACID RAIN, Popakul manifests a highly original point of view staying true to the offbeat technique he established with his previous „Ziegenort” and „Black”. Its crude edginess may intimidate at first but as the film's pace speeds up and the visual capacity fully unfolds it becomes obvious that the film could not have looked differently. The film's glitchy and quirky imaginary landscape mirrors the emotional and social entanglement of its protagonists.
ACID RAIN is produced by Piotr Szczepanowicz and Grzegorz Wacławek of Animoon who produced Marta Pajek's multi-awarded shorts „Impossible figures and other stories” - including „III” that screened at last year's Cannes Film Festival. ACID RAIN is coproduced by Poland's National Archive and Audiovisual Institute and co-financed by the Polish Film Institute. Promotion of the film and its festival distribution is supported by KFF Sales & Promotion.
You can watch the film here.
Source: press materials