Experiencing Interruptions?

Last seen

DCP Available

Łódź, Poland, June 1996. Twenty-three classmates pose for a school photograph — in a city whose textile mills are falling silent, and an adulthood ahead that will scatter them across the earth.
Thirty years later, one of them — now a woman of forty — returns to that photograph late at night. Through her voice we meet the whole class, one by one: who left, who stayed, who is gone. But the longer she speaks about the others, the clearer it becomes there is someone she will not speak about.
An AI-generated poetic documentary about memory, emigration and the price of silence — a generation's story told so that one person's story would not have to be.

  • Jacek Kadaj
    Director
  • Jacek Kadaj
    Writer
  • Jacek Kadaj
    Producer
  • Jacek Kadaj
    Cinematographer
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Runtime:
    8 minutes 37 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    July 1, 2026
  • Production Budget:
    10,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Poland
  • Country of Filming:
    Poland
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital Ai
  • Aspect Ratio:
    21:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Available
Director Biography - Jacek Kadaj

Jacek Kadaj is a cinematographer, photographer, and new media artist with over 30 years of experience in traditional filmmaking. A graduate in Cinematography from the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School in Katowice, Poland, his award-winning work has been exhibited internationally, published by National Geographic and Getty Images, and commissioned by global brands such as Nike, Microsoft, and Samsung. In recent years, he has been exploring the creative potential of generative AI, blending cutting-edge technology with an auteur’s sensitivity to craft intimate, emotionally resonant visual stories.

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Director Statement

"Last Seen" began with a simple observation: my generation grew up in one courtyard and ended up on five continents, and nobody ever really told that story — because it isn't one story. It's twenty-three small ones, and one that never gets spoken.
Every frame of this film is generated. So is the narrator's voice. I directed it line by line, pause by pause — and that process taught me more about authorship than any debate about AI in cinema. The voice doesn't know why it should hesitate before one particular name. It doesn't know that "I don't remember" must sound like someone searching, not apologizing. It doesn't know which sentence is a confession pretending to be a fact. It reads; it doesn't mean. Somebody still has to do the meaning.
That, I believe, is what remains of the director when the images become a given: the judgment, the restraint, the reason for the cut, the pause that carries the weight.
I made a film about people who don't exist, narrated by a voice that doesn't exist either. Only the memory it describes is real — the factories that went quiet, the sons who left, the phone calls nobody answered. If the audience recognizes their own class photograph in ours, the synthetic origin of the pixels will be the least important thing about them.