White Roses: An Animated Lament of Love Lost to War

Łukasz Kędziora’s White Roses is a five-minute animated war drama that takes its title from a Polish patriotic song—Rozkwitały pąki białych róż, or “The White Roses Were Blooming”, also known as Białe róże—and with it flies through a long history of destruction and heartbreak in the country. While the song was written during WWI, the film uses a contemporary arrangement to span a much longer history backwards and forwards.

January Uprising of 1863 against Russian imperial rule. 1920 Battle of Warsaw. The Second World War. The war in Afghanistan. The weapons change, the speed and scale of devastation changes, but the costs don’t look all that different: soldiers fall like pawns and love wastes away back home. Now it’s a cannonball, now a bomb, a musket, a machine gun. Sometimes the grave is in London, sometimes Afghanistan, sometimes a little island without a name. Back home, partners hold their breath with the tautness of a drawn bowstring, waiting for news of death or return.

Emilia Duda’s plaintive rendition applies a restrained drama heightened by Krzysztof Kokosza’s rock arrangement. Alongside, the film whirs through time without linearity, connecting images by the waiting beloved or the latest technology in killing. Cities reduced to rubble, war crimes suffixed with words like ‘again’, death and destruction painted in red and orange. Separated lovers—again and again—wait for the day they will meet again. They look skywards, they look at the ground, they look at their phones, at the TV—anywhere that will bring the beloved within reach.

In the final seconds, White Roses brings history to damning cohesion. Love, hope, and a final, tragic peace become entrenched in white. The hand-drawn animation is simplistic, reducing superficial minutiae down to the bare minimum. Because the overarching theme, the longue durée story, is diagrammatically plain. Those who start wars and those who die in them are two distant circles repelled by one another.

Watch White Roses Short Film Trailer