My Body's Body

In her original concept of a film as a computer game, the author presents her personal report from Budapest where she was spent a year as a student. The viewers take part in a game, going through several levels that put them into everyday situations related to the issues of the contemporary Hungarian society: they see the capital with the eyes of tourists, but they are mostly forced to use the subjective perspective of the Hungarians to think about the freedom of art, the right to education, medical care, and the questionable Hungarian political situation in general where the name of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, is often heard again and again.“The most demanding part of this film was to fight my own paranoia and the standardized thinking constantly produced by my characters and the system I made the film about.” K. Turečková

A video diary exploring the most intimate and most universal. The film looks not only at the political climate within one’s own family, but also explores the boundaries between the public and the private in the age of the internet. This vivid proof of the lack of comprehension between the right and the left does not provide a political analysis, but rather offers one generation’s view of a confused era. “Those stupid kids go on hunger strike against the communists, and their dissident friends think the vice premier is a punk and call him ‘duke’…” The words of Ivan Hoffman, who doesn’t play the guitar much anymore, since there is nothing to play and no one to play to.

The struggle with the tobacco industry, with the help of infotainment and a video journal, authenticity and stylization. Armed with the facts and dressed up as a giant cigarette, the filmmaker heads out into public, to the gates of tobacco companies, and among politicians. Low comedy and the withdrawal mission of a heavy smoker, all with a clear antihero. Day 2. “All I can do is sleep or get drunk and fall asleep… God, how I want a smoke!” The director/main protagonist speaks with the shaky voice of an addict in detox. The facts speak clearly: “Cigarettes kill more quickly than weapons.”

Do the Sudeten Germans who were tortured and killed during their expulsion at the end of the war deserve a monument or not? This Czech documentary shows that this is more than an intellectual question, but a political struggle. In response to a stone monument to the victims of the expulsion in Nový Bor, a group of local inhabitants has unleashed a hate-filled ritual dance of national fervor and moral outrage that turns out to be a sufficiently strong election issue as well.  

Firearms are a multifaceted phenomenon in contemporary society. For some they are a symbol of power, for others they represent certainty, and for others still they are a source of danger. Barbora Chalupová interviews gun owners and people interested in a gun permit, and explores the availability (both legally and illegally) of firearms in the Czech Republic. Her film makes partial use of the internet as an unconventional narrative tool, but is otherwise a typical interview-style documentary. The filmmaker also explores legal gray areas related to homemade weapons.“You see, it’s more about finding out why to have one or not have one. A gun, I mean. Legal… Illegal… But maybe I am just protecting myself with this pilfered political manifesto, or creating an alibi for myself.“

Producer Čestmír Kopecký had originally wanted to make a film about the changing face of Brno, but in the end director Robin Kvapil and co-writer Pavel Šplíchal created something more closely resembling Šplíchal’s ironic blog Prigl. In their “lovingly anarchistic” film, Brno forms the epicentre of a sarcastic look at Czech society. The naive and vacuous communist-era documentary with which Kvapil’s film opens gives way to the reporter’s bitter monologues right in front of the camera. These are intercut with acted sequences featuring Brno’s political elites, artists, and outcasts.“People say that Brno is the only joke that is inhabitable. The entire film follows this logic.” R. Kvapil

In other countries, sexual assistance for disabled people is an established concept, but it is only just getting started in the Czech Republic. Documentarian Dagmar Smržová approaches the subject in a style reminiscent of the films of Erika Hníková. She has chosen three handicapped men and one trained sexual assistant, and follows them in everyday situations, casually asking them various questions. The film explores a subject that, although it is a serious social issue, the public has either ignored or finds controversial. Above all, however, she offers a sensitive look at the intimate lives of people living with disabilities.“... we cannot choose whether we are born good looking or not so good looking, strong or weak and that’s why we should reach out and help each other with things one can and the other can’t do – including making love…”

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. 

A great wave of criticism was aroused in 2011, when the Norwegian Child Welfare Services, Barnevernet, took away both of the Micháleks’ sons. The documentary director, who has two children of her own, set out to Norway to discover whether the state is indeed dictating how parents should raise their children. This investigative documentary uses individual stories and interviews with experts to reveal that the issues are much more complex than the way they are presented by the Czech media. Although the defined rules may be restrictive, they are also apparently one of the reasons why Norway is ranked as one of the happiest countries in the world. “Do what degree do we overlook cases in our surroundings, when parents are not able to handle the raising of their children? Are we respecting privacy? Or is it indifference? Are we able to view the state as other than a necessary evil?” I. P. Miloševičová

A Jesuit, an anarchist, a doctor, and a banking expert showed such civic courage that they were awarded a prize named after one of the most courageous men of 20th-century Czechoslovak politics – František Kriegel. Where lies the line beyond which human dignity is at risk? A meditation on human rights and the legacy of ideas, from unexpected points of view and in unexpected contexts. Anarchist Polák stands against loggers towards the end of the Šumava blockade. Except for a few important details, they agree on almost everything.

The new form of community living called techsquat is open to all creatives, entrepreneurs and managers who want to share their personal and working space-time with similar-minded people. Five young people living together in a Prague apartment like to think of techsquatting as a progressive and stimulating lifestyle. The filmmakers follow their daily lives as they test the viability of this idea. Their observational approach based on long static shots does not prevent them from engaging in a bit of sarcasm – as hinted at in their choice and ordering of scenes and fully revealed at the film’s end.DETAIL:“Quality – it’s basically an attribute of things, like how we spend our time or something that works well. I think that people can be of good quality, too, and I firmly hope that there are a lot of quality people here.”

An experiment involving engaged citizen Roman Smetana – the Olomouc bus driver who drew antennae on politicians’ billboards – expanded into an action drama about courage and (Švejk-like) determination. This feature-length film is an expanded version of an episode from the TV documentary series Czech Journal, and an embodiment of exemplary persistence in civic disobedience. In Smetana’s story, his personal convictions, court rulings, and the post-modern era’s media engineering all converge. In the role of an “ordinary citizen” robbed of 15 minutes of his time by two curious filmmakers, former Minister of Interior Ivan Langer responds with dialectical ease to a simple question: Can you tell the camera that you have never engaged in corruption?