And the Cranes Kept Dancing
2023 · 9m · Poland
Directed by Natasza Cetner
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
A man lured from his family toward the beauty and dance of mysterious cranes on the shore must decide what his priorities in life are.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's too tasteful for its own good—a fable about temptation that plays it entirely straight, all mythic restraint and no teeth. The cranes are gorgeous and meaningless in exactly the way consensus taste expects them to be.
Cetner composes each frame as a deliberate echo of romantic landscape tradition while the narrative syntax—that slow gravitational pull away from domestic life—recalls everything from *Orphée* to contemporary Eastern European cinema's meditation on beauty as moral vertigo. The film knows its lineage and earns its place in it.
The decision to keep the man's face mostly obscured until the final choice moment lets the cranes themselves become the emotional anchor; it's a radical act of restraint that forces the viewer's empathy sideways, away from psychology and toward pure visual surrender.
Festivals
- Imaginaria International Animation Film Festival 2023
- Linoleum Contemporary Animation and Media Art Festival 2023
- Edinburgh Short Film Festival 2023
- PÖFF Shorts 2023
- CutOut Fest International Animation and Digital Art Festival 2023
- Animator Festival (Poznan) 2026