Crulic – The Path to Beyond

In 2007, 33-year-old Romanian Claudiu Crulic was wrongfully arrested in Poland for stealing a judge’s wallet. Despite claiming he was innocent, his arrest record was enough to lead to his conviction. All his pleas for help to his own country went unanswered, leading him to a 4-moth-long hunger strike, which inevitably cost him his own life. Without unnecessary melodrama, director Anca Damian uses every available lead from this rather controversial case to piece together a post-mortem narration by Crulic himself, voiced by Romanian New Wave star Vlad Ivanov. The result is a strikingly beautiful, Kafkaesque story with a touch of black humour, constructed with a multitude of mixed media, from traditional animation to stop-motion and cut-outs, a hint of 3D, some watercolours, a little collage, along with and scanned documents from the actual case. This endlessly inventive universe summons Crulic back to life to make himself heard, like he always deserved.