'Kill It and Leave This Town': too scary to be released

The Polish animated film Kill It and Leave This Town is too crazy for words and too scary, grotesque and miserable to be released in regular cinemas. Fortunately, Cinema RITCS is pairing up with “Please Release Me”.

It really is time to discover Cinema RITCS, the home cinema of the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound in rue Antoine Dansaertstraat. Cinema RITCS already had a programme tailored to passionate film lovers but then it also jumped on the “Please Release Me” train. This is an initiative by Flemish arthouse cinemas from cities like Ghent, Antwerp, Kortrijk and Leuven to put on strong films that no film distributor dares to venture. Saved from oblivion this month: the Polish Kill It and Leave This Town.

For over ten years, Mariusz Wilczynski worked on this unique, autobiographical animated film with the outlines of a grotesque, bizarre nightmare that is as poignant as a close friend suddenly pouring out their heart and revealing torment. It is not easy to describe this difficult to describe, fragmentary, labyrinthine film around a main character who claims not to be good at describing his films.

Wilczynski depicts, sometimes very brutally and rudimentarily, raw memories of his youth in the Polish factory town of Lodz. He also wonders how his parents got into the habit of huddling together and raising a child in 24-carat communist misery despite both suffering from anxiety disorders. He does so without compassion for himself, his alter ego or his mother, who is given a death scene that will wake you up screaming in the middle of the night weeks later. Unless you can handle the extremity and instead appreciate the pitch-black humour and crazy nostalgia.

Kill It and Leave This Town is a deliberately nihilistic and gloomy nightmare, so expressive that it is gripping. Wilczynski eagerly uses the great advantage of the cartoon film: you draw whatever you want, whatever you feel, no matter how far you get lost in your concoctions.