LOVE IN THE TIME OF INFLATION

Short Talk with Zuzanna Zofia Heller (director)

BEST SHORT STUDENT ANIMATION FILM Category

22nd IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival 2025

Poland, Animation, Polish, 00:04:57, 2024

Synopsis: An expressive animated film painted on glass that tells the short story of a young woman in times of rampant inflation. During her daily shopping, she meets a young man with whom she quickly forms a romantic bond. Their relationship develops in a surreal reality where everyday objects and ingredients shrink in sync with inflation, symbolizing economic hardships. The film provokes reflection on the impact of economic conditions on interpersonal relationships.

Biography: Zuzanna Heller, a student of the Animated Films and Film Special Effects at the Polish National Film School in Lodz.

Zuzanna Heller, director

Evgenia Timova: Your film is quite abstract, and I noticed you used a mixed technique. At the beginning, we see real hands, are those your hands?

Zuzanna Heller: Yes, those are my hands.

Evgenia Timova: Later, though, the film continues in 2D, mainly using silhouettes. What was your goal in mixing those two mediums, and why include your hands at the beginning?

Zuzanna Heller: Well, the hands also disappear at the end, but there's a cash machine again, so it kind of connects back. I just wanted to separate the beginning and the end from the main story in the middle, maybe also to have a bit of fun with a different medium, with a different substance.

Evgenia Timova: And when you painted those scenes, because I assume you used brushes, was there any connection with using your fingers? Or did you paint directly with them at times?

Zuzanna Heller: Yeah, I used my fingers too. I use everything I can find, sticks, brushes, even metal tools to create different textures or waves in the paint. Especially when working with watercolors and ink on glass, fingers can sometimes be more effective. But no, I didn’t intentionally connect the use of physical fingers in the animation with the hands shown on screen, it just happened that way.

Evgenia Timova: I believe this is your debut, and it already feels like you’ve developed a strong, bold signature style. Do you plan to stick with it, or are you open to experimenting further?

Zuzanna Heller: Well, it’s not exactly my debut. This was a film from my first year of studies. Before that, I had done a few very short animations, nothing longer than a minute, but this was the first with a more complex plot. I really enjoyed working this way. Actually, my next film is also a painted animation. It’s super slow and honestly quite frustrating to make, but I love the effect. I love how the paint seems to dance, it’s very different from anything digital. And I really enjoy watching painted animation, so yes, I want to stick with that in the future.

Evgenia Timova: It definitely takes you back to the early days of animation, drawing on paper rather than 3D modeling. While working on this film, did you face any unexpected challenges when composing scenes? Did you ever worry it might be too abstract, or was that always the goal?

Zuzanna Heller: The most difficult part was using the multiplane technique, it was my first time trying that. But I tended to think of each frame like an illustration. I always looked for the simplest way to show what I had in mind, like using symbols. For example, when I show someone cutting broccoli, that’s all I need for the viewer to imagine the rest of the scene. It’s more like a graphic design mindset, I think, that’s what I studied before animation. I had an animatic and a storyboard, so in that sense, everything was planned.

Evgenia Timova: That’s impressive, and it really stuck with me when you said you aim to say a lot through symbols. You use symbolism to explore a strong theme. Do you think this is something audiences everywhere can relate to? What motivated you to tell this story in this way?

Zuzanna Heller: There were a few motivations. One was very literal, inflation. It’s happening in Poland, and in other countries too. Every year, I go to the grocery store wanting to buy the same things, and every year, I can afford a little less. It’s frustrating.

I realized there aren’t many animations that talk about economic issues. At the same time, there are so many films about love about relationship problems, arguments, everyday situations. So I thought, why not combine the two? I wanted to tell a story about how the economy affects couples. Like, who's paying today? How do we deal with rising costs together? I didn’t feel like that topic had been explored enough yet.

Interviewer: Evgenia Timova

Editor: Martin Kudlac

Evgenia Evtimova’s Take

Zuzanna Zofia Heller’s Love in Times of Inflation, a student animation from the Łódź Film School in Poland, compresses economic commentary and emotional absurdity into just under three minutes. Formally inventive and unapologetically symbolic, the film navigates the impact of inflation, not only in the supermarket, but also in our intimate lives, using a mix of media that blurs the line between gesture and metaphor, reality and abstraction.

The film opens, and closes, with the director’s real hands, physically interacting with a cash machine. This framing device introduces a tactile layer that quickly dissolves into painted animation, transitioning into silhouettes rendered in watercolour and acrylic, all animated through multiplane setups. The hands, though literal, become a boundary between the practical and the emotional, between the economic systems we can touch and the psychological effects we can’t. As Heller notes, the inclusion of real hands wasn’t premeditated as a metaphor, it simply emerged as a playful formal choice, yet it bookends the film in a way that reinforces the cyclical nature of the topic.

Between those frames, the film leans into abstraction. The aesthetic recalls psychological sketchbook drawings, spare silhouettes and textures, like impressions left behind rather than defined figures. These forms leave space for the viewer’s interpretation, using symbols in place of explicit action. At the heart of the film is a continuous visual motif: objects and bodies that expand, shrink, and distort in exaggerated proportions. Cups, cans, groceries, all seem to change size mid-frame, mimicking a reality in which value is unstable and perception unreliable. At one point, a humorous and slightly grotesque inflation of the male attribute turns a moment of desire into something uncomfortably literal, a pointed but comical visualization of economic pressure bleeding into physical relationships.

The decision to work with painted animation, slow, analog, and resistant to digital cleanliness, is consistent with Heller’s artistic philosophy. The medium becomes part of the message: inflation, both in the financial and emotional sense, is something slow-building, accumulative, and difficult to control. Fingerprints, brush strokes, and the irregularity of the paint itself resist simplification, offering texture as subtext. As Heller describes, the use of multiplane animation was new territory, technically demanding, particularly when working with layered transparencies, but it adds essential depth to the visual field without losing the film’s intimacy.

Love in Times of Inflation is not a story in the traditional sense but a symbolic progression, a miniaturized arc about shared strain. The minimalist visual language is supported by an equally sparse sound design, allowing space for rhythm and visual metaphor to carry the weight. There's an undercurrent of critique, but never didacticism: the film plays with its theme lightly, even absurdly, without diminishing its relevance.

Heller’s film stands out for its compactness, clarity of intention, and visual audacity. In a festival landscape often saturated with polished 3D and overly linear storytelling, Love in Times of Inflation distinguishes itself with a painterly roughness and a conceptual sharpness. It would be well-placed in experimental animation showcases, feminist and socio-economic cinema programs, or as a compact interlude in curated thematic blocks. Short in runtime, long in resonance.