Piotr Dumala, at home amongst cruel tales.

A native of Poland, this director of animation was first trained in visual arts. Since the beginning of his career in 1980, he has followed a Polish animators’ tradition known for their surrealist works such as Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica.His films, in black and white with no dialogue, are based on a technique known as “destructive animation’’ consisting of a series of drawings that are erased and then redrawn in order to reveal light and shadows. It is a technique reminiscent of Alexeieff’s pin-screen or even McLaren’s scratching of film reels.Dumala presents himself as a documentary filmmaker of the interior. Populated with menacing beasts chasing men and women, his films call into question the origin of humanity, the fear that assaults us throughout our lives as well as our animal instinct. For Dumala, animated film represents the shortest route leading to both reality and waking 
dreams.