And Then He Just Stopped

Blinking icons, pop-up windows, a blaring alarm clock, and the blipping of unread messages are normal parts of our everyday lives. The creator turns her back on the endless stream of information and attempts to escape from the world of modern communication technologies for at least five minutes to devote some attention to herself.

Through performances in the post-industrial landscape of the Most Basin, the filmmaker addresses the consequences of exploiting natural resources. Live tableaux, in which symbolic funerals for the devastated landscape - paradoxically full of strange unnatural beauty – are held, are a critical commentary on how we deal with the natural environment.

The film essay brings the audience right into the heart of a historical battle re-enactment. The hundreds of soldiers fighting in historical costumes imitate organized violence; the film oscillates between a game, a theatre play, a Spartakiad and Land art. The multiplied projections evoke war turmoil, further enhanced by quotes from Karel Čapek’s anti-war drama The Mother.

The slow movement of various species of insect in an abstract, brightly lit setting creates suggestive allusions to incontrollable chaos, apathy, and the decay of social structures. The minimalist visual imagery is accompanied by ambient music that works with realistic sound and static. 

This sound-generated animation gives the audible world an impressive visual form of moving geometric shapes or a starry sky. The Max For Live and Touch Designer visual programming languages turn an original soundtrack into space galaxies where the technical and the human, the earthly and the spiritual, and machines and poetry meet.

This experimental film collage makes use of documentary, fiction and animated film techniques. The fading traces of childhood are mixed with the folk culture of the Haná region, all of it shot on 16mm film. The filmmaker thus preserves her chosen motifs, which are slowly but irrevocably disappearing from the present day.

Analogue film as an analogy for the physical world; the digital image as an analogy for the immaterial world. An experimental film that combines two substances to become an audiovisual imprint of our life within a space defined by material boundaries but that nonetheless possess the potential to “rise up” to the level of dimensionless.Fascinations: Exprmntl.cz - Out of competition

Anthony Bird is a war veteran who was the sole survivor of a military operation in his unit. His memories are as surreal as the animation which simulates the course of the incident in the form of a computer game. Everything looks flat but we must trust our own sensees which tell us that in reality, the world isn't flat.

By combining animated real objects, abstract illustrations, and computer graphics, a collage emerges of seemingly incompatible elements through which the filmmakers show the four basic elements – earth, air, water, and fire – and one place – they search for inspiration and passion in structures, shapes, surfaces, and materials of Švihov Castle.

An archaeologically significant site diffuses its memory through levels of the myths, rituals, and folk tales in an essayist discourse on the forms of historical continuity. Absence of contact sound and minimalist music emphasizing the visual motifs of both alive and inanimate tracks in the landscape.

The philosophical dystopia presents warning outlines of the near future where modern technology will not be a sign of progress, but rather decline. Behind the layer of film images, there is a monster created by computer animation, whose abstract virtual body represents the invisible ideological administration.

This personal essay relates the perception of space to the mental universe of screenwriter and director Pavel Juráček who found his “truly ideal place” in the town of Příbram. The sensitive combination of journal entries, intimate notes, and film fragments tries to break down conventional storytelling techniques to build an original world of timeless thinking.