Animator Piotr Dumala’s live action debut is an amazing feat of technological art as well as an intense exploration of loss. Dumala is renowned for his meticulous and vivid animations, and that transfers seamlessly to real space and actors. With the influences of Tarkovsky and Sokurov evident, Dumala’s nearly silent black and white film investigates the psychology underscoring the fractious relationship between a dying father and his son, beginning with an animated prologue. Told in two streams, the minimalist, prosaic interiors of the space the father inhabits is contrasted with the dreamlike landscape of the imaginary forest he leads his son through. In Dumala’s words, “The film attempts to portray the boundary zone between life and death. It examines the difficult relationship of understanding between father and son. They are to be combined with equal rights in animated and acted scenes… The contemporary and forest themes do not signify a separation of the live and animated action. They fulfill themselves in the literary sense and create an impression of parallel coexisting worlds, where the same persons may experience different fates.”