Powerful

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Or, more exactly, propaganda of war. dark, macabre - the music from Balkans as clue - , well crafted and proposing the expected provocative story of Tomek Baginski. ironic parable about war, armies, soldiers and dark sides of "innocent" delights.

I had to make a short presentation for a work not so long ago, using this short film as background and I was quite delighted with it. The fact that I didn't know any work of this filmmaker has led to even more my admiration. There was so much in so short time I could talk about, first with details that are immense, starting with the title, the fact of not having human speech, symbolisms, plus a multitude of them in this cyclical story without end, where everything fit together but you're not quite sure what the main message is. And therein lies the joke of what parallelism may exist with the days of yesterday, today and tomorrow, with different reading each one of us will have after seeing it. I really believe that the major objective of this short was achieved, have fun (yes, because although we are facing a very dramatic story, the humor isn't a foreign language) and bring all the ingredients for us to cook with our imagination and perhaps even more than that.

I have now seen this short film twice. After reviewing it the first time, I received a well written message imploring me to reconsider my review and that I had missed the important anti-war message. So, I have just deleted my first review and have decided to try the film one more time--though I still am very surprised the film received the BAFTA award (the British equivalent of the Oscar).Before I even talk about the content of the film, the first thing that you are bound to notice is the absolutely breath-taking CGI. Despite not coming from a big-name studio like Pixar or Dreamworks, this computer animation is amazing--with rich details and better technical quality than I would have expected from such a company. They deserved lots of kudos for this.As for the content of the film, after looking at the film a second time, I could see the anti-war message just like I did the first time, but I won't go so far as to describe it as "point-less". Sure, there is a point to it--but I just don't think they made it very well. Those who are gung-ho anti-war folks will probably applaud its grotesque message. While I am not some pro-war nut, I just thought that the message was way, way too heavy-handed and gross. Sure, war is bad (duh) but I can think of at least a dozen films off the top of my head that said this better and in more subtle ways.Overall, technically great but not a film I heartily recommend.

It is interesting how everybody was astonished by the visualization in Katedra and in this one. And nobody dig into the story behind. But Beginsky's stories are more than just an add on to the graphics.This masterpiece tells us how some individuals can decide about life and death, and what the army really is. Soldiers are just a tool to achieve the goal of the art called WAR.While the Katedra is more the critique to the church. The man is alone and when the church shows him the 'light' he's captured forever. In my opinion Beginski tries to describe the problems in a more subtle way with great visualization and 3D graphics.