Reflective Encounters

“Katarzyna Miechowicz’s Crumbs of Life is an easy film to get lost in, with its gorgeous psychedelic colours that paint its scrappy cutout-style animation and characters that amusingly move as bits of paper connected at the joints. There is an immensely inviting sense of mood and atmosphere, from the warm beachfront landscapes the film mainly takes place in, to the jazzy soundtrack overlaid with laser sounds, which many would consider a ‘vibe’. The film is composed of absurd vignettes, with immeasurable details to fixate on, including, but not limited to: a woman seemingly in a relationship with a sasquatch and rotund horses that wander around murmuring vaguely legible words.

These fragmented ideas eventually coalesce to a focus on two characters: a woman who fixates on her feet, and a news anchor who fixates on a pimple that grows uncontrollably. While these mild discomforts seem like largely negligible problems, in Miechowicz’s animated world, they continue to balloon and escalate to uncomfortable and exaggerated ends. Eventually, for both of them, the flesh takes over, adopting corporeal form and supplanting the self, with the news anchor’s pimple taking over his body Akira-style. Amongst the surreal imagery there is something deeply relatable in how the film portrays how our insecurities, if not handled properly, can easily take over and consume our lives.”

— Matthew Chan