One can call the animated feature Projām / Away a one-man-show with ample justification, since Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis, in his first feature filmmaking venture after making several shorts, from one of which Away is an expansion, seems to occupy every possible production capacity in this animated feature, from direction and script to design, production, editing and music, with nobody else noted on the main credits except from a digital compositor working on some of the visual effects and a production accountant, and had the film any dialogue one suspects one would hear Zilbalodis’ dulcet tones on the soundtrack as well.

Financed by an apparently minuscule grant from the Latvian State Culture Capital Foundation, Zilbalodis has said that this gave him an enormous amount of freedom, since the Foundation was basically funding him out of their change jar, and, following the example of the 2016 international co-production Le Tortue Rouge / The Red Turtle, with which the renowned Studio Ghilbi were involved among the many global co-production partners, he knew that the most universal language is silence, so although there is music and effects, the film is dialogue-free.

Away’s story could not be more simple, as a young boy finds himself on a remote island, appearing to be the only survivor of some sort of accident, and, happily finding a fully-fuelled and functioning motorbike, and a flightless bird for company, traverses the several different terrains and climates of the island in trying to get back to what he believes to be his home. But the island is also the home of a large, shadowy apparition, some sort of spectre which seems to envelop anything living which comes it’s way, and seems to be constantly on the boy’s trail.

Of all this seems quite nebulous, and very little is eventually explained, the filmmaker, still in his mid-twenties, explained that much of the film was formed and created by a software package called Maya which, in its simplest terms, allowed him to use the virtual ‘camera’ to explore the locations and setting he has created and work from there, the software being as much a ‘creator’ of the film as Zilbalodis himself and leading him in plotting and planning out the final feature, and for the technically-minded a full and very detailed explanation of his techniques and the technology involved is findable online.

Zilbalodis is very vague as to any concrete meanings his project may have, leaving it very much up to the audience what they read into it, where the boy is what is he searching for and what the flightless bird and the spectre represent, in the broadest term representing hope and fear respectively in the most nebulous ways, and indeed where, or perhaps what, is the island, and while some may complain that Away may not have the detail and textures of most CG rendered animation, one has to remember that the budget of this, made over three years, has been described as barely enough for an animated short.

Having largely played the festival circuit, both real and virtual, during 2019-20, including Montreal’s FantAsia and winning the Best Feature prize at the Animast animation festival held in Romania, and the international reviews were largely glowing, The Hollywood Reporter finding ‘Somewhere between Hayao Miyazaki and Terrence Malick lies Away, a gorgeously made minimalist cartoon that’s long on beauty and breathtaking scenery, if somewhat short on traditional narrative’, and Cineuropa saying ‘ …displaying multiple influences should not be mistaken for being derivative - Away feels like a complete and satisfying movie in its own right. Admittedly, some of its impressive nature comes from the nature of its production: the entire movie was created by Zilbalodis alone with no crew. The animation, music (which is also an excellent, and important, part of the film) and editing were all done by him alone, and on a technical level, it’s an astonishing achievement’. The Film Stage said ‘[The boy] moves through stunning vistas and by cute critters each rendered (like him) without outlines so color variances are the sole means of defining depth and three-dimensionality. That sounds crudely simple, but there’s nothing crude about Zilbalodis unique style. […] It’s the type of achievement that makes audiences remember an artist’s name’.