Tomasz Raczek

“Animal” is a film that collects awards at world festivals for a reason. As a juror of BNP Paribas Green Film Festival, I voted myself for him and probably it has won the competition also thanks to my vote. Here we have a logical and cool sequence of events that leads to the destruction of the planet. We are doing something wrong on all fronts, and the source of these errors is our selfishness. We exceed the limits of nature's tolerance, if only because of our love of consuming animal meat produced on a large scale. In fact, animals bred in captivity and in terrible conditions are tortured throughout their lives, but in order to feed them, we torture all nature: another hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests are cut to grow soybeans, which are the main component of forage, changing the climate, soil irrigation and natural oxygen production. The heroes of “Animal” are conducting the investigation we are witnessing. It can change our lives, our behaviour. Just like it has changed mine. 

Bartosz Wójcik

Over the years, in Crossing the Boundaries we have dealt with various “borders” in the cinema and we have followed the paths of crossing them. For several years, we have observed dynamic technological changes that modified the way we tell stories with images and sounds, such as holography or virtual reality. A special place was taken here by the crisis related to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. But we were also interested in what the cinema tells about – the differently understood concept of “freedom”, the personal one and the one limited by the oppressive state; we discussed the fluid border between creativity and public image, reaching self-creation. And, most importantly for me, we have always been curious about what comes out of it all, what may be a consequence of what is happening today. This year, therefore, in a special, somewhat “global” way, we focus on the question of what we are doing today and what may result from it tomorrow.