Sep 9, 2021

Exclusive Trailer Premiere: Malta Pajek Post-Apocalyptic short "Impossible Numbers and Other Stories I"

The latest (and concluding) installment of Marta Pajek's disorienting and mysterious Impossible Figures and Other Stories trilogy is set to world premiere this month at the Ottawa Int'l Animation Festival.

We're delighted to share the exclusive debut of the film's trailer:

Despite being the final film in the trilogy, Impossible Figures And Other Stories I is actually the set-up to the other two films, which were labeled as parts II and III. The earlier films were big hits on the festival circuit, winning dozens of awards including grand prizes at Stuttgart and GLAS, with Part III premiering at Cannes.

Pajek explains in the notes to her film why she chose to create the films out of order:

Pajek's sixteen-minute production begins with a massive explosion and follows a mysterious and elegant elderly woman who wanders the deserted city streets, recalling what was and what could have been. Though the film was developed long before the pandemic, its production during the Covid-era gave new meaning to its story. Pajek speaks about how the pandemic and other environmental factors informed her filmmaking:

Impossible Figures and Other Stories I is a hybrid of hand-drawn animation (on paper!) and cg. The short is a co-production between Warsaw, Poland's Animoon and the National Film Board of Canada. Piotr Szczepanowicz and Grzegorz Waclawek were producers for Animooon, and Maral Mohammadian did the same for the NFB. The executive producer was Michael Fukushima, who recently retired from the NFB.

Watch Cartoon Brew's interview with Pajek about the first two films in the Impossible Figures trilogy: