Warsaw Rising film receives Muse Award in US
PR dla Zagranicy
Peter Gentle
24.05.2011 12:02
‘City of Ruins’, a five minute-long documentary which simulates an aircraft flight over the ruined Polish capital of Warsaw in 1945, has received the prestigious Silver Muse Award from the American Association of Museums.
Commissioned by the Museum of the Warsaw Rising of 1944, the film was premiered last year, during the events marking the 66th anniversary of the Rising and is now shown to the visitors to the museum.
The film presents the scale of Nazi destruction of the Polish capital after the fall of the sixty three day-long rising. It reconstructs a flight by a B-24 Liberator bomber that dropped aid packages for city residents.
Animators from the Platige Image Studio, led by Tomasz Bagiński (author of Oscar-nominated ‘Cathedral’) studied hundreds of archive images and maps and employed the 3-D technique to transform the blurry black-and-white photographs and historic footage into the virtual images offering a life-like experience of the war-torn city seen from the air.
Six hundred Soviet photographs of postwar Warsaw and two aerial maps from 1945 and 1947 provided by Polish army cartographers were used. The project took a 30-strong team a year to complete.
The film ends with captions showing Warsaw's population on September 1, 1939 - 1.3 million, August 1, 1944 - 900,000 and after the Warsaw Rising - less than 1,000. (mk/pg)