24th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
llllllIIIIl
director: Petr Salaba
original title: llllllIIIIl
country: Czech Republic
year: 2017
running time: 27 min.
synopsis
The film’s title can be seen as an anti-captcha, a text that is easily machine-read but difficult for people to understand. Working in the style of a documentary essay, the film considers the problem of the autocracy of machines. Apocalyptic visions inspired by the film The Terminator are projected onto the reality of destructive protests against the G20 Summit, whose catalyst, means and outcome are statistical analyses of behavioural models realized using the computers and telephones in our pockets. A collage of original images, commented graphs and internet garbage. For the full viewing experience, please have your smartphone ready.
“This text can’t be longer than 200 characters. That’s 60 more than a tweet by Donald Trump.” P. Salaba
biography
Petr Salaba (1990) participated in academic exchanges at a boarding school in Norway and at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts in Vancouver, Canada. He is currently studying at FAMU’s department of documentary film. He also develops computer games and interactive documentaries. He has made the documentary films It’s Not Just You! (2014) and This No Man’s Land of Mine (2016) about the fictional tax paradise of Liberland.
more about film
| director: | Petr Salaba |
| producer: | Ondřej Šejnoha |
| photography: | Vojtěch Dvořák |
other films in the section
“The deed did not occur,” proclaimed Vladimir Mečiar in 1996 on the murder of businessman Róbert Remiáš, which likely had a political motive and with which the Prime Minister himself was likely involved. His infamous dictum is an attempt to negate a documentary that combines an investigative approach with original filmmaking. The director builds her film on interviews with key players in the Remiáš case but does not limit herself to an austere presentation of facts. Alternating different film formats, from black and white film to VHS, she evokes a period of crime and highlights the central theme of confrontation with the past.
“I wanted to make a poetic political film. Engagé art should not give up on the style.” B. Berezňáková
Never Happened
Barbora Berezňáková
Slovakia, Czech Republic / 2019 / 82 min.
section: Czech Joy
Czech Premiere
Twenty-one politicians reply to the question of how they view the Czech Republic’s future. The survey, built on the democratic principles of equality and freedom of speech, provides the same conditions for all of the interviewees and presents their uncensored and complete responses. However, this raw materials provides more testimony regarding the present than the future, as it unmasks the faces MPs and senators present to the public and demonstrates the rhetorical means they use to expand political power. Freedom is a double-edged sword depending on whose hands hold it. The same applies to media as a tool used for disseminating propaganda as well as for undermining it.“The film shows the people behind mandates, trying to approach them on the condition that they have to approach us. To what extent is a different form of public meetings with politicians possible? To what extent are other worlds possible?” T. Bernátková
Solos for Members of Parliament
Tereza Bernátková
Czech Republic / 2018 / 34 min.
section: Czech Joy
World Premiere
Poet Daniel Hradecký is the main actor of of this inter-genre film about a journey into the depths of his own consciousness. The black and white documentary parable looks into the human soul with interplay of sounds and raw images. Several episodes take place in the rough landscape of North Bohemia, accompanied by dramatic music. Their narrative includes fragments of the poet’s texts and his memories, reconstructed in the film: Daniel starts a shift in a factory, or he meets the devil in the dark. The film maps the poet’s inner world, and sinks deeper and deeper to the bottom of the raw imagination with him.
“Is the man who likes dreaming happy?” A. Hospodářský
The protagonist of the film, Daniel Hradecký will be reading poems as well works of other author after the screening of the film on Friday 25.10 in 18:00 in the Café Etage.
Nekyia: Inner portrait of the poet Hradecky
Albert Hospodářský
Czech Republic / 2019 / 25 min.
section: Czech Joy
World Premiere
Karel Köcher is supposedly the most important communist agent to infiltrate the CIA. There are few reliable sources as to his activities, and so the filmmakers aim their camera primarily at the main protagonist. The result is an unconventional portrait that tells us more about a man living a double life than about any sensationalized spy activities. The mystery surrounding his actions also envelopes Köcher the individual: it is difficult to figure out what is going through the mind of someone so perfectly in control and capable of beating a lie detector. DETAIL:“People will say, ‘Oh well, you learned to lie so how can we believe you?’ But it’s not like that, you see? When you lie for a reason, that doesn’t mean that you are a liar by nature. It’s a technical matter.”
RINO
Jakub Wagner
Czech Republic / 2015 / 95 min.
section: Czech Joy
World Premiere
This episode from the Czech Journal series examines how a military spirit is slowly returning to our society. Attempts to renew military training or compulsory military service and in general to prepare the nation for the next big war go hand in hand with society’s fear of the Russians, the Muslims, or whatever other “enemies”. This observational flight over the machine gun nest of Czech militarism becomes a grotesque, unsettling military parade. It can be considered not only to be a message about how easily people allow themselves to be manipulated into a state of paranoia by the media, but also a warning against the possibility that extremism will become a part of the regular school curriculum.“In order to identify the reason for which people prepare for war in the name of peace, I have started to portray the rising military spirit in a kaleidoscopic image.”
Czech Journal: Teaching War
Adéla Komrzý
Czech Republic / 2016 / 69 min.
section: Czech Joy
World Premiere
A sophisticated portrait of the Czech custom of “tramping” as seen through a personal lens, the film reconstructs and deconstructs the myth of the Czech dream of freedom. The metaphor of “America” serves as a space for personal projection for the main heroes, as well as a symbol of a lost paradise, whose lack of a time and space anchor gives a skewed impression of an indefinite feeling of absence. Lazily moving between a road movie, a pure romance movie, and an observational musical, questions begin to form: Is it a game? Is this serious? The unclear answer perfectly fits with the utopian world of tramping, where words like “fiction” and “reality” really have no place. DETAIL:“Yeah, like, but you have some idea of what America’s like, we don’t....” “But you have country there!” “Yeah, we have country....but your country is different than our country. It’s more romantic, I’m telling you...”
Amerika
Jan Foukal
Czech Republic / 2015 / 70 min.
section: Czech Joy
In this film on Czechoslovakia’s post-communist “coupon privatization”, the central them among the many opinions and reminiscences heard in interviews with historians and participants is the conflict between the predatory capitalistic order and the more socially conceived alternative, which remains alive and well in Czech politics today. Precisely because of this emphasis on the older debate regarding social aspects of society, this look back at the early days of Czech capitalism is relevant today. Using the blunt, timeless method of “talking heads”, the film reveals that just after the revolution a significant percent of the population was in favor of some type of socialism. The film this searches for reasons why the country turned towards capitalism.
DETAIL:“And that’s why I’m a libertarian, and that’s why I’m all for a free market - tens of thousands just have to try it so that one of them can succeed, and most of the time it’s purely chance that it works out for them.”
The Czech Way
Martin Kohout
Czech Republic, Slovakia / 2015 / 92 min.
section: Czech Joy
World Premiere
This film about the situation in presentday war-torn Ukraine originated over the course of a year as the director’s travel journal. Ukrainian teacher Tania, who works in Prague as a cleaning lady, takes the fi lmmaker along to visit her family in Transcarpathia. The director also meets with his friends who are local journalists, and with Petr, a revolutionary who gives an atypical tour of the residence of Viktor Yanukovuch. Observational, mostly static shots, in which Remunda appears only occasionally as a witness or moderator, is accompanied by his off-screen commentary offering reflections on his own relationship with Ukraine and with the media in general.DETAIL:“Drug addicts have been eradicated as a social class. So there’s none here.” “And where are they?” “I’d say they’ve gone for treatment. They’re sick people. They should be treated. There are all kinds of ways. They’ll get a shovel and dig trenches.”
Czech Journal: Near Far East
Filip Remunda
Czech Republic / 2015 / 70 min.
section: Czech Joy
World Premiere
In a small village in the southern Czech Highlands, the director meets with sixteen-year-old Ben to examine the issue of defining his identity in person: Ben is living in a girl’s body, but feels like a boy. With his real feelings, he flees into the online world and truly feels happy, for example, when using greenscreen technology to participate in Prague Pride. The film indirectly captures the (mis)understanding and (un)acceptance he meets with at school and his focused insight is completed by interviews conducted by the director with his mother and sister, who involuntarily embody everything that Ben hates about himself.
“What I like about it the most is how the story of a teenage transgender boy can disrupt the conservative structures of a television film, go beyond the media, and challenge the inhumane sterilization of transgender people in the Czech Republic.” K. Turečková
Why Do I Feel Like A Boy?
Kateřina Turečková
Czech Republic / 2019 / 26 min.
section: Czech Joy
World Premiere
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.”
Traces, Fragments, Roots
Květa Přibylová
Czech Republic / 2016 / 20 min.
section: Czech Joy
World Premiere
In this documentary essay, the director personally presents the history of electronic and experimental music from the pre-war years to the present day. The film takes place in an almost dream-like space-time that serves both as a recording studio and as a museum of technological artifacts, which allow the filmmaker to take playful grasp of the concept of talking heads. The sonically and visually layered excursion to the beginnings of the efforts to liberate and conceptualize sound is also a debate about the forms, possibilities, and perspectives of the acoustic relations to the world, in which the voices of the past constantly overlap with the sounds of the future.
„Music documentaries usually tend to build a monument to a composer, band or subculture… My aim was to treat this topic in an essay-like style, using all available means that film as an audiovisual medium offers.” J. Ožvold
The Sound is Innocent
Johana Ožvold
Czech Republic, France, Slovakia / 2019 / 68 min.
section: Czech Joy
Czech Premiere
This cinematic reportage with elements of a personal journal explores xenophobia in Czech society and anti-Nazi activists, but also the filmmaker’s personal experience from living among in an socially excluded Romani neighborhood. Most of the footage was shot by the director using his own camera, and the immediacy of the images is further accentuated by voiceover observations and commentary. In just a few scenes, he adds music for dramatic affect. With his direct questions, he tries to unmask the racist arguments not only of anti-Roma protestors, but also of many ordinary citizens.
DETAIL:“I’d toss a grenade in there.” “In where?” “Among the gypsies. They reproduce like rats.” “They should be killed?” “Yes. You know what Hitler should have done? Leave the Jews and shoot the gypsies. There’s too many of them.”
Czechs against Czechs
Tomáš Kratochvíl
Czech Republic / 2015 / 88 min.
section: Czech Joy
Czech Premiere
