crulic - drumul spre dincolo

This highly original animated documentary reconstructs the true (!) story of an individual who gets caught up in the wheels of the murderous European bureaucratic machine. The director illuminates the dark side of the system in her second feature-length production using various animation techniques: hand drawn images, photo collages, computer trickery, plasticine figures and occasional slightly modified stock footage. One particularly distinctive feature: the main protagonist narrates and reconstructs his own life and death similar to Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Billy Wilder’s legendary feature film SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950). When Daniel Claudiu Crulic (voiced by actor Vlad Ivanov) begins his tale, he has in fact already passed away. The thirty three year old Romanian died in 2008 in a Polish prison while on hunger strike, having been accused of a crime he couldn’t possibly have committed and then dismissed by the bureaucratic machine as worthless.

This sophisticated montage, combining imagery and audio, lends this ballad of the decay of humanity and the omnipotence of boundless greed a delightful rhythm and tremendous pull, from which emerges an in equal measure unsettling and harrowing warning: a Europe, in which public authorities and civil servants prefer to sidestep responsibilities and in which the individual doesn't count for anything, makes for a life not worth living.