My Name is Hungry Buffalo

synopsis

Jan calls himself Buffalo. He loves cowboys, he’s blind, and may lose his hearing. Pavel Jurda’s documentary follows his journey to America to visit the chief of the Navajo tribe, who wants to perform a ritual to help his hearing. The film is full of unpretentious humor thanks to Jan’s charisma. In the USA, he’s like the Don Quixote of the Wild West - a naive adventurer in a world that is much more ordinary than his imagination. This observational, but not standoffish, film is also an example of how the medium of film can relate to blind people by constantly showing the difference between what Jan perceives and what we actually see.

“The film is not about blindness, even if the main character is blind. It is about yearning for life. ‘We are all handicapped in some way,’ says a guy during a journey that starts with an accident and ends in triumph.”

biography

My Name is Hungry Buffalo is Pavel Jurda’s (1970) feature-length debut, but his filmography already includes a number of television projects. In addition to a science documentary series for children called I will be Einstein, he also made the historical films Muž, který měl nebýt (2008) and Hotel Veselý hřbitov (2010), as well as a film about the relationship between important and unimportant objects Všechny moje věci (2010).

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