Grandfather’s Magic

With an international arrest warrant out on him, Russian artist Oleg Vorotnikov of the radical art group Vojna (Military Service), infamous for his politically engaged protest performances, is an alluring enigma for the young documentary filmmaking student. She attempts to learn more about him and his family through a series of (attempts at) meetings in Berlin and Prague.

A documentary with distinctive elements of animation will lead us to the czech side of the Bohemian Forest, where the bark beetle calamity started at the beginning of the new millennium. The film deals not only with the political context surrounding this disaster, but also with the ecological aspects of the situation - the relationship between men and nature.

The colonisation of Mars went from being pure science fiction to becoming a reality in 2020, with the first steps now being taken to achieve what was thought to be the impossible. The film’s heroine Michaela Musilová knew from an early age that she wanted to become an astronaut. After years of hard work, she now leads the NASA base in Hawaii, where life on Mars is simulated. Michaela is struggling to find balance and doesn’t know whether she wants to be a wife spending time at home on Earth by the family fireplace or an explorer discovering the inhospitable and lonely universe. Does she want to be an American astronaut or a Slovak citizen?

A film portrait of a legend of the Czechoslovak music scene takes a look at rock keyboardist Marián Varga (1947–2017) near the end of his life when he was diagnosed with a terminal illness. She filmed this hugely introverted chain smoker during his last performances as he slowly began to lose his breath.

Lenka Benešová skillfully worked the creative process into her final project. The filmmaker’s documentary film Prostředek, about the colorful personality of Stanislav Lysák, is incorporated between episodes taken from the filmmaker’s family life and sources of inspiration. The path to a good film becomes the protagonist of this short film.

The current climate crisis is feeding into the massive spread of the bark beetle, and it is already clear that it cannot be stopped. Entire forests are being cut down all across the Czech Republic, leaving huge clearings in their wake, and after mammoth mining machines come in to do their dirty work, all that remains is desolate, suffocated land. “What we're demonstrating here is that it’s all just ‘a numbers game’ of who can mine the most cubic metres and what company can make the biggest fortune.” What problems will a new treeless landscape bring us? Barren landscapes are places we tend to look away from. This visually refined, black and white reportage film tries to convey the physical experience of mining and the clearings we create on a daily basis. It also poses an alarming question: “Do we really care about the forest?”

A documentary observing the fortunes of the Al-Araqarqeeb , a village that has been already destroyed 111 times. The Bedouin settlement was needed for military training, so the army ordered its evacuation in 1951. The inhabitants were not permitted to come back even after the date that was set for them to return. The village is being repeatedly demolished by the state of Israel since 2010.  The struggle between the state and its citizens continues.

A topical film created for the anniversary of the Warsaw pact occupation cleverly combines 3D animation and actual archival footage. The film’s main character is a Russian solder who looks back on the invasion and comes to a paradoxical conclusion of how his life could have been very different.

A black and white portrait of cameraman and amateur radio operator Ladislav Prajsner who uses the popular OK2PAY American term on the airwaves. In this field, he is one of the best since he has managed to gradually establish radio contact with all the countries in the world. 

Mini portrait of one place - atmosphere of solitude in the middle of the city - life change of one woman - water as an element. Short film poem flowing like a river with which our main character learns and learned to coexist.

“When Joe says that the world will end in twenty years, why make movies?” “But this is also a culinary film!” This summery, sunny portrait of the French film collective MTK, devoted to their artistic cinema lab equipped to work with black and white and color material, offers similar impressive fragments of thoughts, comments and questions. The film will be screened from 16mm film.