Two Roads

For more than 30 years, former government clerk František Krause has had an active interest in ornithology. He studies birds and protects them, building birdhouses and trying to be as close to them as possible. He records birds with mathematical precision, archives his records, and carefully organizes all his information. Gogola’s documentary portrait shows how Krause combines love for nature with a positivist respect for facts and logical thinking. This remarkable symbiosis is fleshed out and subtly ironized by the narration, whose consciously exaggerated emphasis on minor facts subverts the conventional descriptive commentary we are used to hearing in traditional nature documentaries.DETAIL“Here you can see that the youngest branch of the Krause family comes to an end.” “And what will you leave behind?” “Lots of bird houses.”

Jaroslav Kučera was the husband of director Věra Chytilová and one of the most original cameramen of the Czechoslovak New Wave. Footage that he captured in his free time for private purposes served a few decades later as the basis for the creation of a fragile, intimate portrait which dispenses with words. In it, the master of the image freely sketches the innermost space of his family. Thanks to the director’s sensitive selection, we observe scenes of spontaneous posing before the lens and moments of repose, compellingly woven together with a soundtrack by producer Aid Kid. “The most important information about Czech literature of the recent decades can be found in literary journals by Jan Zábrana, Ivan Diviš, and Pavel Juráček. With that in mind, we approached the processing of cameraman Jaroslav Kučera’s film diary.” J. Felcman  

FilmPLACE, inspired by the famous collection of stories by Jan Neruda, returns to the same Prague neighborhood in order to compare its current state with the spirit of a place that (because it is required reading) has imprinted itself on the Czech unconscious. This collage of people and often tragicomic scenes is not just about memory, but provides an unfiltered look at the social changes etched into the old houses.

“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  

FilmAFRICA follows two Central Europeans on an adventure to Zambia to repair a village’s solar panels. They are aware of the value of their work, whose purpose they see in helping the villagers – these, however, are not satisfied with their lives. Black and white mindsets subtly, humorously, and touchingly collide.

After he finished shooting his last feature-length film Insects, Jan Švankmajer became the protagonist of a film himself. His creative method is partially revealed by Jan Daňhel and Adam Oľha, who spent three years with the internationally acknowledged filmmaker, graphic artist and unorthodox thinker. This allowed them to capture specific situations as well as the artist’s general thoughts on food, fetishes, and the end of both humankind and Western civilization. This playful, associative and tactile portrait, whose fluctuating form provides an outline of various options, is supplemented with the perspectives of friends and colleagues, chiefly Jaromír Kallista, the producer of Švankmajer’s films. The artist’s wife and muse Eva is shown throughout the film through memories, dreams and archive footage.     “We wanted to create a formally independent film that does not copy Švankmajer’s signature style. Just as in alchemy, we based our work on three mutually interconnected principles. Specifically these were Jan Švankmajer, Jaromír Kallista and Eva Švankmajerová. Another very important element was the Surrealist Group, which is Švankmajer’s second family.” A. OľhaQ&A with the filmmakers Adam Ol'ha and Jan Daňhel:

The joint title Dying for beginners brings together two short films that the directors shot together “in hospices, maternity wards, trains, and elsewhere.” They are based on interviews with the same protagonists and about similar subjects, but always as seen from a different angle. The first film, Marek Bouda’s The key of silence explores music and its relationship to old age and death. For instance, it asks what music we can hear in heaven or what music to play after our passing. In Dying for beginners, Bára Kopecká looks at the taboo subject of death in crematoria, among the dying, or in the maternity ward. “I was interested primarily in how music is reflected in the face of the listener when he is moved by it. And silence – the counterpoint to music, a pause in the composition, the end of life... the silence that remains after we are gone...” B. Kopecká

A melancholy portrait of a fan of auto tuning, who – when not behind the wheel of his home-tuned but slowly decaying car – stumbles aimlessly through life. An exploration of the main protagonist’s barren landscape of relationships and of the barrenness of northern Bohemia, where the story takes place. Both these “vacuums” are filled at least temporarily by the roar of engines – heavenly music for Ráďa. Despite an extreme observational format, the filmmaker works with a language full of metaphors that encourage reflection even when the viewer least expects it: in a parking lot in the middle of a loud tuning meet.DETAIL: “I never sleep in the tent. If you sleep in the tent at tuning meets, they’ll knock it down in the morning. When I was in this one club, they knocked down my tent and stuffed potatoes up my tailpipe. That really pissed me off.”

After the murders of the journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, the shooting of the documentary about a new kind of social establishment in which the traditional state structures become replaced with Mafia and oligarchy took a huge turn. By interviewing various persons - lawyers, bloggers, journalist, security experts, and former secret service agents -, the author tries to uncover the complex network of those influencing the Slovakian public space. The investigative film about a country in which the communist regime fell thirty years ago offers overwhelming facts about the unclear relationships among former secret service agents and interest groups, and shows the issues and threats faced by both journalists and the public. “The murder of a journalist raised more questions than just who the killer was. The tragedy illuminated the real picture of social institutions and created a short window when it was possible to capture it with a camera.” Z. Piussi

FilmSOLITUDE looks at six men and women living without a partner even though most of them say that they would like one. In order to show the life of single young people over the course of one year, the director uses a restrained style, focusing on important features of the protagonists’ behavior, their habits, and their surroundings.

A multi-portrait of the history of post-1989 Czech ideas and sensibilities, centered around left-wing Christian philosopher Karel Floss. Circling his ideas on God, truth, and politics like satellites are statements by strongly antithetical individuals including Milan Knížák, Ondřej Slačálek, Noam Chomsky, and Czech nationalist thinkers. Working with a subtle sense of irony, the film is openly inspired by the style of Karel Vachek as it makes use of semantic counterpoints, situational humor and aloof formal elements. The result is a kind of audiovisual riverbed for channeling the fury of a nation that recalls a child that is just learning to think and does not know what to relate to first, because in a certain sense, basically “everyone is right”.DETAIL:“That means that truth unifies, but it unifies without asking us to give up on differences. And so we fling ourselves into the trap of dogmatism – any position is dogmatic if it claims that if there exist truths, then these truths will not accept any differences.”

“Most prisoners like boxes.” The constrained nature of prisons opens up an infinitude of fantasies and free artistic expression. Environment determines means of expression. A project of confrontation and dialogue with artists from the outside shows radical diff erences and a conspiratory divergence from social norms. This essay on imaginary and physical freedom introduces us to the extreme thoughts of our own boundaries and limitations.