23/12/2025 - Polish director Alicja Błaszczyńska's short animation takes a surreal perspective on contemporary consumer culture

Many people will fondly remember the whimsical animated public-information film from Australia, Dumb Ways to Die, where bean-like creatures kicked the bucket in the most extraordinary manners. Alicja Błaszczyńska decides to push that idea into more unsettling territory by placing her more human-like characters in a Polish supermarket where – full of greed and self-absorption, yet still spectacularly foolishly – they are trying to… do their shopping.

Central-Mart had its world premiere at the 22nd Animateka – Ljubljana's international animation festival. It’s Błaszczyńska’s third short – after Chainlets (2016) and Mud (2018) – and, as before, she probes the complexities of human behaviour. Over the course of a dozen minutes, the story focuses on six people, each of whom is in the shop with a specific goal.

One of them is looking for frozen food, and nothing can stand in his way. Not a dead body mysteriously found in the freezer compartment, nor a rival shopper who keeps annoyingly sliding the compartment's lid backwards and forwards.

Another, resembling a dried raisin, is crawling on the floor to reach the lemonade fridge – which seems to slide away out of pure spite each time he approaches (but is in fact being moved around by oblivious supermarket staff).

A third is a woman who just wants to buy chicken on a discount, and if the person in front will take it before her, well… that’s not going to stop her from getting what she wants. Real problems arise when the shoppers' paths to their goals begin to accidentally collide...

Made in pastel colours and with ambient-techno-like music throughout, the film takes the viewer on a journey through an uncanny alternative reality where everything seems a little bit askew. The frowns on the characters’ faces look repulsive, the doubled outlines with which they are drawn are distracting, and the black of their eyelids and pants, stippled and uneven, evokes a trypophobic nightmare.

By juxtaposing the appealing elements (the visuals, the music, the humour) with more unpleasant ones, Błaszczyńska delivers a story that both mesmerises and irritates, shocks and amuses. The structure of Central-Mart initially suggests a straightforward, linear story, but the narrative ultimately loops back to its starting point: will they shop until they drop?