The Last Self-portrait

synopsis

Slovak director Marek Kuboš has not shot a film in 13 years. His first film ever – a student exercise at film school – was a self-portrait. The circle is closed, the source of creativity has seemingly dried up. All that is left to do in the last self-portrait is to clean up after oneself, to recapitulate one’s successes and failures, and to bid farewell to one’s protagonists. This introspective meta-documentary is not so much a study of a creative crisis as it is a self-therapeutic process and an attempt at offering a comprehensive profile of the filmmaker at a time of unstable certainties. Appearing in the role of Kuboš’s consultants are essentially all leading Slovak documentary filmmakers.

"I’ve long felt that through documentary filmmaking I can’t say what I want to, what calls out to me. I’ve butted against internal and external boundaries that have paralyzed me as a documentarian. " M. Kuboš

biography

Marek Kuboš (1970) studied documentary film at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and is often included in the so-called Generation 90, a group of outstanding filmmakers who attended school in the 1990s that includes Jaroslav Vojtek, Peter Kerekes, Robert Kirchhoff, and Marko Škop. He is best known for his documentary A Photographer’s Journey (1993), followed by Train Station 2nd Class Kraľovany (1998) and Voice 98 (1999).

more about film