05/07/2024 - We spoke to the young Polish filmmaker whose award-winning short film marks her as a major talent to watch with a unique artistic vision

Barbara Rupik is a Polish film director and screenwriter specialising in puppet and mixed media stop-motion animation. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice and the Polish National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź. Her short animation, The Little Soul, premiered in 2019 at the Cannes Film Festival, where it scooped Cinéfondation’s Third Prize. Her graduate short film, Such Miracles Do Happen, tells a remarkably abstract story about a boneless little girl and moving statues. The film has an utterly original vision, exuding a mystical and sacred atmosphere reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s work. It premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2023 and received the Golden Dove Award for Best Animated Short Film at DOK Leipzig that same year. We watched the film at this year’s Animafest Zagreb, where it won a Special Mention in the Student Competition.

GoCritic!: The plot is clearly abstract and allegorical, providing a great deal of freedom in terms of interpretation. What were your sources of inspiration for this film? How did the idea for the film come about?
Barbara Rupik: The idea came from a sense of nostalgia for worlds that disappear, for childhood and the way children see the world, for a childlike sensibility. It also stems from my fascination with magical realism which toys with the blurred boundary between two worlds – the mundane and the spiritual.

I loosely based the plot on my own memories. I vividly recall the time when I lived with my grandmother in an attic: an unusual, gloomy place with only one small window, the size of a human head. The attic was home to an infestation of moths, a bunch of daddy-long-legs and two parrots. There was also a homemade altar with figures of all the saints and glowing angels. In my eyes, they seemed really powerful, filled with an unearthly energy beneath their plaster and porcelain bodies. So the main source of inspiration was a place that no longer physically existed and that’s only alive in my memories, together with the recollection of its atmosphere and the bedtime stories my grandmother used to tell me there. In Such Miracles Do Happen, I wanted to create something along the lines of a waking dream. I have recollections of certain dreams, but I’m not sure whether they really were dreams or actual events. It's a very strange feeling, as if there’s some kind of suspension between two worlds, and I wanted to reflect upon that in my film.

Barbara Rupik's Such Miracles Do Happen

There’s a contrast between the solid, hard, rigid bodies of the sculptures and the melting, unarticulated, soft body of the girl. What was your main intention with this contrast?
The girl is a human being – a very remarkable one. Her boneless body is associated with children's sensibility: how a child is susceptible to shaping and absorbing the outside world, reading and transforming reality through the prism of their senses and imagination.

On the other hand, I’m very fond of being literal, so I decided to show her unusual physiology emphatically. I wanted my human characters to look like they were made of strange living tissue as opposed to being still and dead in order to resonate more loudly with the miracle of bringing the inanimate matter of statues to life. They’re made of stone, wood, plaster, but suddenly they’re able to move, whereas the girl's living body can’t take a single step.

You have a rather unique and unconventional visual style, which might be described as an “aesthetics of ugliness”. What was the motivation behind this decision?
Yes, I do think the characters are ugly, but for me, they’re also beautiful and sometimes even cute. I love this kind of combination. I explore themes such as decay, spirituality, physicality and biomorphism in my aesthetics. The boundary between decay and beauty is almost seamless in my eyes. I like to juxtapose opposites, both in narration and in my visuals, in order to contrast materials, emotions and themes and to seek out harmony between them.

Barbara Rupik's Such Miracles Do Happen

What materials did you use to make the puppets?
They’re a combination of puppet and clay animation with oil painting animation, which is very wet and gooey. Most of the characters and objects are covered in oil. I really love mixing textures, and when I use this method, there’s no limit when it comes to mixing materials. It allows for some interesting experimentation. In my next film, I’m going to explore and develop this further.

I’m really curious about the film’s sound. The music and sound is all your own work, as is the voice. How did you come up with it all?
Oh yes, sound design is one of my favourite stages of filmmaking! The sound isn’t just an accompaniment to the story to enhance the atmosphere. It’s one of the most important elements of storytelling. I like it when you can close your eyes and hear the whole story.

In most cases, I try to record all of the sounds myself or use ready-made samples, which I modify later. Here’s a fun fact: when I was creating the music for this film, I recorded the song sung by the main character while standing on a vibration platform exercise machine, to get a tremolo effect. I love experimenting with sound!