Somewhere in Eastern Europe. Young runs away from her depressing hometown. Her early enthusiasm about hitchhiking fades when she finds herself on the city outskirts in the middle of the night. At the bridge she meets a figure balancing unsafely on the guardrail. That’s how she meets Skinny—a kind of unstable weirdo. Skinny lives in a camper van, which he uses to run his not-so-legal job errands. Together with him, she sets out on a journey with no destination. As the ride continues, a particular affection grows between the two of them.
*Acid Rain* developed as a result of my fascination with rave subculture and its iconography—especially the early years of that scene. I wanted to depict mixed feelings: fascination and repulsion, community and alienation in the crowd, naive spirituality and “human dirt”, nature and civilization, the crave for colors and grey everyday reality in a post-communist landscape of Eastern Europe. The film is a patchwork of my own observations, freetekno parties on former military compounds, goa trance parties in forests, research about the acid house scene in the UK, stories heard from people that started the rave movement in Poland, and also pure imagination, all making one colorful mix. The soundtrack is made by artists that I respect very much: Escape From Warsaw, Chino, Ceephax, Reptant/Lou Karsh, and Jerome Hill.

Links: https://vimeo.com/304086902, http://animoon.pl/en/projects/acid-rain-happy-hardcore/, https://www.facebook.com/AcidRainShort/?epa=SEARCH_BOX

Writer, director, and designer: Tomek Popakul

Cast: Daria Bułka, Piotr Bułka, Maciej Miszczak

Sound: Michał Fojcik

Music: Escape from Warsaw, Lou Karsh/Reptant, Chino, Ceephax, Jerome Hill

3D animation: Krzysztof Rakszawski, Shibabrata Chakraborty, Jacek Mazur, Oleksandra Zakrevska,
2D animation: Adrian Fijałek, Damian Krakowiak, Maria Kulpa, Kasia Melnyk
Production: Animoon, National Archive – Audiovisual Institute
Producers: Piotr Szczepanowicz, Grzegorz Wacławek (Animoon)
Co-financing: Polish Film Institute

Tomek Popakul (PL), born in 1986, graduated in animation from the Łódź Film School. He also studied scriptwriting for a year. He made a couple of short films—among them his graduation, multi-awarded film *Ziegenort* that screened at dozens of festivals around the world. He participated in the Animation Artist in Residence Tokyo 2014 residency program organized by Japan Image Council (JAPIC) where he's made a film *Black*.