Adult Contemporary: Experimental Music Video 016

Gertjan Zuilhof is former programmer for the Rotterdam film festival. Although he is not a China, nor does he speak Chinese, he became good friends with numerous independent Chinese filmmakers. Zuilhof has chosen two recent independent productions to illuminate the situation of independent Chinese filmmakers today –Man’s World by artist/filmmaker Han Tao and Welcome by producer/filmmaker Zhu Rikun. Both deal with police brutality, but do so in very different and stylistically distinct ways. Spoken word is very important in both films – lies as well as the truth.---Dílnu vede / The Workshop is led by: Gertjan Zuilhof

One of Ságl’s few non-documentary films captures the underground scene in one static shot showing a never-ending mass of people emerging from the escalator in the Prague metro. Although it is clearly a structural film – a fixed composition with several layers of motion – Ságl also uses it to explore social issues. The mass of commuters is carried forward by a seemingly unstoppable force without any chance of escaping the flow of people – an image of early Normalization in the 1970s. The film was repeatedly projected as a visual accompaniment to concerts by the Plastic People.

One of the longest broadcasted programmes in the history of Stream, an Internet TV, is based on creative disruptions of the standards of commercial TV stations. The episode that undermined the shooting of a reality cooking show, Prostřeno (Come Dine With Me), and touched on the problems of people who suffer from Tourette syndrome was one of those whose broadcast caused a media scandal.

The third part of the documentary series that follows a class of Roma children from the Brno quarter called Bronx for several years. In the first two parts, the children learnt to work with cameras to present a unique testimony about their lives and their families. The third part continues to follow the individual stories of the now teenagers.

It is the late 1980s. Petr Mička and Jirka Imlauf are friends at the Faculty of Education in Ústí nad Labem. Two years still remain before the Velvet Revolution. What could their random participation in an unpermitted protest possibly achieve? And what happens after a random look into the Cibulka List of supposed collaborators 20 years later?

Julius Varga was an atheist suffering from a terrible disease. After twenty years of being bound to his bed and imprisoned in an immobile and deformed body, he embarked on an inner spiritual journey in search of Christ. In Normalization-era Czechoslovakia, under constant surveillance by State Security, he gathered around himself a group of young people, becoming their guide and teacher in matters of life and death.

The “Dumpling Feast” was a private event held at the home of Dana and Jiří Němec on Prague’s Ječná Street. The idea for the event came from Ivan M. Jirous, who held the family’s dumpling recipe. Besides showing several people cooking and an improvised concert, the film’s main focus is on a “happening” by Jan Steklík and Karel Nepraš of the Crusader School of Pure Humor Without Jokes – the “measuring of the food.”

With almost no commentary, this portrait of a young rural early-grade schoolteacher shows the tenacity of a woman who must battle daily snowdrifts on her skis to reach her job. The filmmaker interweaves shots of mundane tasks in lyrical compositions presenting poetic views of the landscape.“Sýkora’s themes revolve around insignificant people who find themselves in extreme social or psychological situations. In each case, he has grown humanly fond of his protagonists.” Rudolf Urc

Traveler and director Dan Přibáň crisscrosses the world with his crew in yellow trabants and provides fresh information from around the world. His last trip will lead us to China, which will be topis of his workshop. We will talk about absurdities, which look comical for outside observers, but are a harsh reality for ordinary local people.

For a year, the filmmakers followed the work of nurses in different environments – in homes and hospitals, and on a foreign mission. The cycle is a complex insight into the problematic area of Czech health care, telling a story of women and men who share responsibility, stress, and modest salaries.

A portrait of a boy sent to work in a farmer’s household, where he attends the local school. It captures not only the hard work he performs, but also those times when he plays with a dog and his frequent cigarette breaks. The documentary uses observational scenes of activities that at some points present even idyllic images of a human connected with nature.“ … the small farmer Jano longs for only one thing – to return from a society he does not understand, one which is foreign to him, to his solitude, back to nature…’ Rudolf Urc

When a village mayor in the Shanxi province gets killed, one of the villagers is chosen by the police as a scapegoat. His drawings of the torture to which he was subjected to plead guilty to the murder he did not commit, yet for which he spent five years in prison, are a testament of police brutality in Shanxi.