29th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival

24. 10.–2. 11. 2025
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...And I Didn't Run Away!

Žižka never ran away from battle, nor did the most famous confectioner in Šumava, Karel Sedlecký, heir to a family tradition, who survived forced conscription into the Third Reich, collectivization, and imprisonment in the 1960s. The story of the master confectioner, thanks to whom production in Sušice grew beyond national significance, shows how the communist regime persecuted its own talents.
director: Vladimír Mráz
original title: ...A já jsem neutíkal!
country: Czechoslovakia
year: 1989
running time: 12 min.
Food and EpochThe film already had its Czech Premiere
11:22

11:22

On April 4, 2025, thirty-eight minutes before noon, the Korean Constitutional Court removed President Yoon Suk Yeol from office. Black-and-white footage cut into vertical patterns and rotating targets captures the moment the verdict was announced and the vibrant atmosphere in the streets of the capital city of Seoul. The image, stretched in time into geometric structures, is accompanied by a noise track of collective emotion.
director: Myun Yi
original title: 11:22
country: Republic of Korea (South Korea)
year: 2025
running time: 4 min.
FascinationsWorld Premiere
A Capsized Boat

A Capsized Boat

A self-reflective monologue accompanying images of loneliness draws us into an inner world composed of fragments of dreams, memories, and unfinished books, telling a fragmented story of loss, longing, and desire.“I can sometimes hear my house breathing through my mouldy walls. I try to look at the sky and the trees. And they look back at me with contempt.”
director: Tridisha Goswami
original title: A Capsized Boat
country: India
year: 2024
running time: 4 min.
FascinationsInternational Premiere
A Festive Lunch

A Festive Lunch

Everyone knows that frozen pork is best in summer, even in England. Only housewife Evička is unsure, so a TV guide advises her on how to prepare dinner from frozen meat so that František will enjoy it when he comes home from work. This educational film, presented from the perspective of a kind teacher, reveals the mechanisms and advantages of a progressive, centrally planned economy.
director: Vladimír Voves
original title: Sváteční oběd
country: Czechoslovakia
year: 1958
running time: 4 min.
Food and EpochThe film already had its Czech Premiere
About The People Around The Table

About The People Around The Table

Miloš Kopecký comments on himself in the roles of restaurant guests who suffer from various social ills. This satirical parade of grotesque human characters, such as the angry man, the alcoholic, the womanizer, and the thief, reminds us to be kind to restaurant staff, as they truly have much to endure.
director: Petr Schulhoff
original title: O lidech okolo stolu
country: Czechoslovakia
year: 1959
running time: 14 min.
Food and EpochThe film already had its Czech Premiere
Aether

Aether

Kawaguchi's Aether follows on from his earlier film Air (1992), in which he enlarged 8 mm film material, breaking down the image to the level of individual grains and transforming it into a painting. Now he replicates the experiment through a different medium: a digital camera captures a girl walking away in slow motion, and artificial intelligence transforms the enlarged image, finding patterns in the visual noise and thousands of faces in the blurred image. The immortalization of a single happy moment is transformed into a meditation on digital visuality. “When the deterioration progresses and the loss of information exceeds a certain threshold, an image ‘imagined’ by the AI ​​appears. […] This new ‘noise’ can be said to be closer to an ‘illusion’ in the visual recognition process within the brain. However, in the sense that images are essentially ‘imitations’ of reality, this can be said to be the very nature of images.” — author's commentary
director: Hajime Kawaguchi
original title: Aether
country: Japan
year: 2025
running time: 13 min.
FascinationsInternational Premiere
Amnion

Amnion

The amnion – the fetal membrane protecting the embryo – becomes a metaphor in the film for an intimate space where pain can be shared and a path to healing sought. This sensitive portrait of three women whose lives have been marked by sudden separation is carried from the outset by a meditative soundtrack that shapes an environment in which personal experience becomes expressible. Ritual gestures – traditional costumes, cooking together, hugging – create a protective shell that allows pain not only to be expressed and shared, but also transformed.“True healing simply means opening yourself up to the truth of your life.” — from the film’s accompanying material
director: Sarah Lomenová
original title: Amnion
country: Czech Republic
year: 2025
running time: 12 min.
Fascinations: Exprmntl.czWorld Premiere
AMOOSED: a moose odyssey

AMOOSED: a moose odyssey

When director and ethnologist Hana Nováková encountered an elk, it changed her life. And she wasn't the first. For centuries, people across continents and cultures have been fascinated by this ancient totem animal, one of the largest mammals in the northern hemisphere. Whereas in the past they wanted to conquer it, today they tend to listen to it. The director's cinematic odyssey is the result of several years of searching for the secrets of the moose. It leads from Czech forests through a Russian domestication station to the territory of the indigenous peoples of Canada. A collage of stories told from personal, spiritual, and scientific perspectives shows the moose as a guide between worlds, a symbol of balance and renewal, and a possible answer to the question of how we can heal our relationship with nature.“Filming animals across the planet is an extraordinarily epic undertaking—all the more so when it involves a ‘process film,’ i.e., the unfolding observation of events whose outcome we often cannot predict, even though we know for certain that they were triggered by the filming itself.” — Hana NovákováSource: Dok.revue
director: Hana Nováková
original title: AMOOSED: losí odysea
country: Czech Republic, Slovakia
year: 2025
running time: 76 min.
Czech JoyWorld Premiere
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An Emancipated Woman Cooks

The stove is the saddest altar to which half of humanity sacrifices its abilities, strength, and satisfaction. This critical portrait bitterly comments on the double-edged meaning of emancipation in post-war society, which built up the image of the working woman, but did not abandon the cult of the housewife. Labour market reform is not complete without reform of the household.
director: Zdeněk Forman
original title: Emancipovaná žena vaří
country: Czechoslovakia
year: 1971
running time: 17 min.
Food and EpochThe film already had its Czech Premiere
noimage

Basics of Hospitality Service

Waiters and waitresses perform a ballet of salads, forks, and desserts as the main characters in a culinary performance at one of the restaurants operated by the Jednota co-operative. Under the watchful eye of their supervisor, the employees implement a set of rules, instructions, and regulations that represent a kind of shadow world of their own, hidden behind the scenes of the restaurant, and behind the backs of the diners.
director: Jiří Jeřábek
original title: Základy obsluhy v pohostinství
country: Czechoslovakia
year: 1961
running time: 12 min.
Food and EpochThe film already had its Czech Premiere
Being Here, Dreaming There

Being Here, Dreaming There

Super 8 footage of hunting and other pastimes from Peruvian archives sinks into absorbing visual whirlpools that absorb both the bodies depicted and the viewers' gaze. This tribute to the legendary Our Trip to Africa (Unsere Afrikareise, 1961–1966) by Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Kubelka, from which this film takes its soundtrack, was created as one of the “variations on intimacy” – a collective project of the MUTA International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation in Lima. “The film explores the lingering spectres of colonialism and the eerie contradictions of tourism, echoing Kubelka’s radical montage techniques while probing the politics of vision and presence.” — Péter Lichter
director: Péter Lichter
original title: Being Here, Dreaming There
country: Hungary
year: 2025
running time: 3 min.
FascinationsWorld Premiere
Between Lips and Glasses

Between Lips and Glasses

Have another drink, you don’t know what’s waiting for you outside, advises a FAMU’s cinéma vérité-style report, filmed in the U Kocoura pub in the velvet year of 1989. The pub chanson, sung by Petr Hapka, accompanies the turmoil of overflowing human emotions, from exuberant merriment, to drunken melancholy, to a universe of silence, spilled tables, and empty chairs.
director: Mira Erdevički
original title: Mezi rty a sklenicemi
country: Czechoslovakia
year: 1989
running time: 8 min.
Food and EpochThe film already had its Czech Premiere
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e-mail: info@ji-hlava.cz

Festival partners

Ministerstvo kultury
Fond kinematografie
Město Jihlava
Kraj Vysočina
Creative Europe Media
Česká televize
Český rozhlas
Aktuálně.cz
Respekt
Dafilms

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