The addition of 17 movie-themed bronze monuments along a popular tourist route highlights the city’s cinematic tradition.
Tourist route ‘Łódź Bajkowa’ puts Łódź in the director’s chair
- 09 December 2015
The project not only enhances the city’s status as a tourist and investor destination, it also presents Łódź as a creative centre and broadens its citizens’ knowledge of our film traditions.
Łódź, located in central Poland, is well known for its film tradition – especially in the area of animation. Every year, students come from all around the region to attend the popular Łódź Film School.
Creating a tourist route
To further the economic development of the area, city officials decided to combine this robust cinematic tradition with tourism. The project establishes the ‘Łódź Bajkowa’ tourist route. Along the route, visitors can follow popular fairy tale movie characters from Se-ma-for, a Polish animation studio founded in Łódź in the 1940s that produces animated cartoons and stop-motion films. One of its films, Peter and the Wolf, was nominated for an Academy Award in the United States in 2008.
Although the main idea of the project is to promote the city’s film heritage and further improve the tourist industry, it also serves as an excellent reminder of the carefree times of childhood and an opportunity for parents to introduce their favourite childhood fairy tale characters to their own children.
Central to the city
The route features a total of eight bronze monuments of characters from the most famous Polish fairy tales. The route meanders its way through central Łódź, taking in many of the city’s cultural institutions and tourist attractions.
The route is also popular with locals, many of whom pass by on a daily basis on their way to and from work. The route can be either walked or biked, and maps are readily available from the tourist information centre.
Ongoing promotion
To promote the route, the project has launched a Facebook and web presence. There have also been a variety of events centred on the monuments, such as an opportunity for children to dress the monuments up with warm clothes for the winter months.
Organisers also launched a ‘passport’ scheme, where children collected stamps featuring each of the individual statues that they visited. Additional sculptures are also planned for the near future.
Total investment and EU funding
Total investment for the project “Promotion of the film brand of Łódź by creating the tourist route ‘Łódź Bajkowa’” was EUR 143 831, of which the EU’s European Regional Development Fund contributed EUR 122 256 from the Operation Prgramme “Łódzkie” for the 2007 to 2013 programming period.