is a feature-length documentary about memory, nature, and the act of creation. Its protagonist, Józef Wilkoń — an illustrator and sculptor — spends his life trying to understand animals and, through them, himself. Nature remains his first and last teacher.

The film does not reconstruct a biography. It immerses the viewer in a world. Pyzia the cow, a hare encountered in the forest, or Baśka the horse appear not as milestones of a life story but as images of memory — fragments of experience from which imagination is born. Wilkoń returns to early book illustrations, to The Kitten Who Was Looking for Black Milk, to Pan Tadeusz, the Polish national epic, and to animals that have always been different: too wild, too gentle, too strange to belong — like people. He speaks of war, fear, guilt and tenderness, of rage and wonder.

At the same time, the camera follows the creative process in real time. Watercolour flows across paper, stains escape control, and from raw pieces of wood new creatures gradually emerge — sculptures that grow in the garden like a second, imagined forest.

The film takes the form of an essay on passing time and on making, whose emotional center is an intimate story of the loss of a beloved wife. ANIMAL is not a portrait of an artist, but a quiet conversation between a human being and nature, and with one’s own life — toward words that have “not yet been spoken.”