THE BUTTON | IN DEVELOPMENT

| SYNOPSIS
A giant clothing factory, somewhere far in the East. Women and children sew buttons on fabric in a monotonous rhythm and seem to be part of a system of machines. One worker has a framed picture of a girl with a fabric rabbit at her workplace. And it is she who sews a cracked button to the fabric. The sorting machine evaluates the button as a defective piece, cuts it off and sends it to the disposal process. But the button in the rain slips from the bed of the truck full of rejects and slides onto the road and thus escapes its fate.

Water is flowing down the road. The cracked button will serve as a rescue raft for a drowning beetle for a little while, but the bug will eventually drown anyway on its way through the sewers. Right after, a girl finds the washed out button and the button becomes her rabbit’s eye. A sudden explosion sweeps away everything around and only the rabbit is left lying on the ground, staring blindly through its cracked button eye. A photographer’s lens captures it as a memento of destruction.

The button is torn off by a giant raven. The cloth bunny now has a black hole for an eye, from which a crowd of girls emerge. The raven flies away. A white seagull sent by the crowd of girls engages with it in an aerial combat for the button, and the button is freed in this tug-of-war.

It falls towards the sea and lands on a cargo ship. There, the photojournalist picks it up and takes it as a talisman to an opulent photo exhibition.

The exhibition is dominated by a large photograph of a rabbit with a button eye.

A woman dressed in the factory-made sweater is sipping champagne at the opening, but all her buttons are flawless. Visitors view the exhibition with empty eyes, they have black holes instead. A girl who is the only one with actual eyes appears behind them. She covers her eyes with her hands, and instead of tears a flood of cracked buttons rolls out from under them. Everyone starts sewing the cracked buttons onto their clothes. A factory in the East starts to mass produce them…

…and the originally cracked button falls apart in half. The world stops. A girl appears from the fog, half a button in her hand. She carefully takes a beetle out of a puddle by the canal. The dead bug lying on top of the half button will fly away.

| CREDITS
Director, Script, Art director – Lucie Sunková
Producer – Alena Vandasová, Martin Vandas (MAUR film, CZ)

Animation technique – 2D animation /drawing, pastel, painting on glass, collage/
Estimated length – 8 minut

Financially supported by Czech Film Fund.

| GALLERY