Traces, Fragments, Roots

Květa Přibylová / Czech Republic / 2016 / World Premiere / 20 min.

synopsis

A museum of rotting apples, a Christmas tree shedding its needles, a splintered tree trunk, maggots crawling over a honeycomb… The sound of a falling apple hitting the ground, speech classes, Christian sermons, the baaing of sheep… Images and sound continuously come into contact with each other in the twenty-minute film Prints, Shards, Roots, presenting creative encounters between the human world and nature. The film could be termed an experiment, but it is more of an evocative lyrical series of images and sounds, which gain power through the effective shots taken with a 16mm camera. The beauty of the decaying natural items that is consistently called is set against a backdrop of human artefacts, which is slightly indifferent but no less mysterious.

“‘I really don’t know what’s wrong with it, no matter how much water I add, it’s still too runny.’ I once ran into this sentence somewhere – it’s about mixing mortar – and I like it more and more.”

biography

A student at FAMU, Květa Přibylová (1987) typically shoots short, poetic, experimentally tinged films, such as My Fair Baby (2009, Jihlava IDFF 2009) about the transformation of waste into toys, Pomni koní (2009) about horses, and the fifty-minute Chitter Chatter, That’s All You’re Good At. Said Vegetable. (2014, Jihlava IDFF 2014), which is dedicated to the nonsense poet and parrot lover Edward Lear.