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

about the author

Born in Hajnówka, Poland in 2000, Szymon Ruczyński is a student of Animation at the Lodz Film School. He grew up in Białowieża, a village in the centre of the ancient Białowieża Forest – the source of inspiration for his award-winning films Reason and The Wildwood Diptych. In 2021 and 2022 Szymon participated in bringing humanitarian aid to the refugees hiding in the forest. He uses mixed animation techniques to tell stories about socially relevant problems he witnesses.

festivals and awards

– 63rd Krakow Film Festival, Poland

– 2023 Ottawa International Animation Festival, Canada

– 2023 PÖFF Shorts, Estonia

– 37th Leeds International Film Festival, UK

–  Animateka 2023 International Animation Festival, Slovenia 

– 36th Premiers Plans Film Festival, France

– Anifilm 2024 International Festival of Animated Film, Czech Republic

– 16th Go Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen, The Netherlands

filmography

– Reason (2020)

–  The Wildwood Diptych (2021)

– There are People in the Forest (2023)