Dreamy and nightmarish surrealism prancing around the life of a Polish filmmaker as he rises to ascendance and finds his own artistic voice through the past.
Spending an evening of watching nothing but shorts for some visual research, we stumbled upon this hidden gem on MUBI. Surreal doesn’t even begin to cover the peculiarity of this movie which is precisely where I love to start. Boro in the Box, the elliptical and fantastical biography of Polish filmmaker Walerian Boroczyk with the slight alteration of had he been born with his head in a box.
Looking out at the world through a hole in his box, his perception may be limited but his creativity was not, a genius in a box, inside another box, inside another one recounts his life through the alphabets, taking us through the movements of his life and rise to prolificity. This sweet tale of all the side effects of growing up like love, grief and passion is framed in such a delirium of beauty. Behind the delicate shots composed with such artistry is a sense of filth that you can’t wash off at all. Events of his life told through black-magic realism, the surreal is unfurled and thrown at you from every twist and turn, with little time for us to process the previous bizzarro turn of events before the next knocks on your eyes.
There’s something rather sinister about the ominous tintinnabulations of the soundscape, each little sound going *ting* and *ping* in your ears, sending shivers down your spine. There’s incredible depth to this film and at many points I found myself having a laugh at how far this wild thing would go with its weirdness. Accompanying this is the beautiful use of the camera, moving us through his life as if it all exists on one singular set like a fucked up doll-house left dilapidated after a nuclear bomb went off. There are no restrictions on the camera, it spinning away from us, crushing us into close ups and hurling us away with its merciless framing.
Easily one of the strangest short films I’ve ever seen and compared to all the messed up stuff burned into my brain, that’s saying something.
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