The Big Animal

The circus leaves town and a camel is left behind. Zygmunt and his wife Marysia take the animal in and start looking after it. The two get used to the camel and grow attached to it. But the neighbours are put out. First the talk, then a petition, then official obstacles. Nobody can say what harm the camel does. Jerzy Stuhr's seventy-three minute Polish film was shot in black and white. The screenplay comes from a text Krzysztof Kieślowski wrote years earlier and never used; Stuhr filmed it after his death. The subject is not the camel: it is how a community reacts to something that is different. The tone is calm and the humour bitter.