There Are People in the Forest / W lesie są ludzie
country, year
Poland, 2023
genre
animated documentary
running time
10′
directed by
Szymon Ruczyński
languages
Polish
subtitles
Slovene subtitles
about the film
A lone man limps down the road. A lorry drives by with several armed men. They catch him and take him into the woods. The only witnesses are the people of a nearby village. Since 2021, such scenes have been a daily occurrence on the Polish-Belarusian border.
what was said about the film
“This is a simple film. A big synthesis of a vast problem. At the beginning, I wrote out over seventy different situations that I had witnessed or knew about first-hand. Later, I had to truncate this to make it fit into a ten-minute film. I am sometimes accused of this, but for so much nuance you need a different length, a different form. In this case, it was necessary to go down to a basic level, to truncate the subject from the context of the big geopolitics. To say that people must not be abandoned in the forest without help; that they must not be allowed to die in the forest. And they must not be abused. And what our services are doing, and even more so what the Belarusians on the other side are doing, is simply said abuse of another human being.”
– Szymon Ruczyński for Dwutygodnik
trailer