Further co-production support came from Editura Video and Kraków Festival Office. The film received financial support from the Romanian National Centre for Cinema, the Polish Film Institute, the Kraków Film Commission, the Romanian Ministry of Culture and Editura Video. The film was made with a mix of techniques including hand-drawn animation, cutout animation from photographs, scanned documents, projection, stop motion and digital 3D. It was the first Romanian animated feature film in two decades, and the team of animators was formed specifically for the film. All the artwork and animation for the film were done at the animation and visual effects studio DSG, in Bucharest, by a team made of Dan Panaitescu, Raluca Popa, Dragos Stefan, Roxana Bentu and Tuliu Oltean, with Vlad Pascanu and Andrei Saraliischi. As a stylistic choice, Damian decided to use photos mixed with drawing, and to make the outlines of the drawings gradually thinner as Crulic comes closer to death. At the end of the film there is live-action news footage; Damian intended this to remind the viewer that the story did take place in the real world. The film premiered at the 2011 Locarno International Film Festival. It was released in Romania on 21 October 2011 and in Poland on 1 December. It was not initially planned to be released theatrically in Poland, but after positive festival reactions, the Polish co-producer decided to give it a release. The Polish version was dubbed by Maciej Stuhr. The French release was on 12.12.2012, and the French version was dubbed by Vlad Ivanov and Sandrine Bonnaire. The movie was theatrically released also in Czech Republic, Italy, Hungary, Germany. Giuseppe Sedia of the "Krakow Post" compared the film to the journalistic comics of Chappatte, and the darkly humouristic sensibilities of the Romanian filmmaker Lucian Pintilie. Sedia wrote that the film "has, deservedly, been cherished across Europe." Jay Weissberg of "Variety" praised the artwork and Damian's straightforward style of storytelling, but had a reservation about how he sometimes found it difficult to process all information on the screen. Weissberg wrote: "Beautiful artwork and a powerful story are the key elements of animated docu "Crulic — The Path to Beyond", recounting the Kafkaesque history of a Romanian man arrested in Poland and abandoned by everyone until his death following a hunger strike in 2008. ...