Paths of Hate
2010 · 11m · Polonia
Directed by Damian Nenow
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A dynamic story explores hatred as an inevitable element of human nature, set against aerial warfare. The confrontation shows how that hatred drives its participants.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Nenow's doing the intellectual heavy lift on hatred-as-inevitability, which is fine, but the aerial warfare framing feels like the *expected* container for that argument—I wanted him to pick a weirder vessel, or interrogate the premise itself rather than just illustrate it.
Nenow positions this squarely in the lineage of philosophical animation—Kricfalusi's darkness meets Švankmajer's formal precision—and the restraint in his visual language, the refusal to sensationalize the warfare, marks him as a stylist aware of what animated abstraction can say about ideology that realism cannot.
The decision to render the pilots as silhouettes rather than individualized figures—that single formal choice does the entire thematic work, collapsing personality into pure antagonism and making the hatred structural rather than personal in a way dialogue never could.