Thinking Through Film 5: Authorial Choices

Andrea Slováková / 10 min.

synopsis

Can a camera capture the world without changing it? Filmmakers at Ji.hlava IDFF explore the boundaries between documentary and fiction, authorial intervention and truthfulness. Through choices of perspective, situations, and context, film reveals not only what we see, but also how we create knowledge about the world and how we think about it.

“Documentary film does not construct the world itself. It constructs the form in which the world can be known.” — from the film’s commentary

biography

Andrea Slováková (1981) is a director, poet, curator and film theorist. She makes documentary essays and experimental films that have been screened at festivals in the Czech Republic and abroad; Ji.hlava IDFF has presented her films In Sight (2011), Recovering Industry (2015) and 500 Plateaus (2020). From 2020 to 2024, she was Dean of FAMU. She founded the publishing house Nová beseda. She has been involved in Ji.hlava IDFF since 2002, curating experimental, retrospective and VR programs.

Janka Vlčková (1981) is an editor of documentary, fiction and experimental films and a graduate of FAMU. She has worked with Vít Klusák, Filip Remunda, Martin Mareček and Olmo Omerzu, among others. She has won Czech Lion Awards for her editing of Filthy (2017) and Winter Flies (2018). Her other editing credits include Old-Timers (2019), Bird Atlas (2021) and the documentary Steam on the River (2015). She has collaborated with Andrea Slováková since 2004 and has edited all of her films.