The latest initiative of the Warsaw Rising Museum recreates a computer generated bird’s-eye view of Poland’s capital in May 1945.

The animated film was produced using around 600 archive photographs and cartographic photos made by the USSR in 1945 and 1947.

The film lasts 5 minutes and 6 seconds: exactly the same amount of time needed for a World War II plane to circle the centre of Warsaw.

 “The film replicates a ruined Warsaw […]. The viewer sees the capital from a circling plane,” describes Jan Oldakowski, director of the Warsaw Rising Museum, adding that “the most striking image is that of the totally destroyed ghetto and Old Town.”

The film was made by the Platige Image studio, which won an Oscar nomination in 2002 in the animated short category for director Tomasz Baginski’s “The Cathedral”.

30 people from Platige Image worked on the project, using around 100 computers which rendered the images into 3D for the purposes of the film. The cost of production amounted to 1 million zloty (around 245,200 euro).

“It is very hard to describe in words the totalitarian social engineering that the Germans undertook in Warsaw in 1944, destroying the city and forcing its residents to move,” states museum director Oldakowski.

The final screen titles show the extent of Warsaw’s depopulation throughout World War II: from 1.3 million residents on September 1, 1939, to under a thousand survivors in the area engulfed by the Warsaw Rising in 1944.

“City of Ruins” is to be premiered on August 1, which marks the 66th anniversary of the Warsaw Rising, a failed attempt to liberate Poland’s capital from Nazi occupation. The film will become a permanent exhibition in Warsaw’s Rising Museum. (jb)

Sources: PAP/Gazeta Wyborcza

Images copyright: Platige Studio

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