A well-known Polish animator, screenwriter and director, Walerian Borowczyk (pronounced bo-rov-chick) began his career creating experimental animated shorts while earning a living as a graphic artist. Little is known of his early life beyond the few facts that his father was a painter and he was a teenager when Germany annexed Poland in 1939. Some critics have conjectured that the latter event might been the source of his films' thematic use of random brutality, a nostalgia for a more Edenic past (usually represented through art works) and a commingling of militaristic and religious symbols.

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