Czech Joy

The film takes place on the eighth day of Russia's war campaign in Ukraine. Eight Ukrainians residing in the Czech Republic – a businesswoman, cleaning ladies, construction workers, and bus drivers – make their own diary-like observations of the events in their homeland. They continue to bury themselves in their work, unable to afford to withdraw themselves from their current lives. In their minds, however, they've transported themselves hundreds of kilometers away, helping their fellow countrymen and women by any means necessary. They provide accommodation for refugees, scout for bulletproof vests, and call their loved ones who’ve taken shelter from falling bombs. They have a hectic and emotionally overwhelming 24 hours ahead of them. But it’s not the first 24 hours and it won’t be the last.“Through the personal stories of real Ukrainian people, the film brings intimate insight into the many facets of war.” — Oksana Moiseniuk---Source: https://www.dokrevue.cz/clanky/osmy-den-valky

A children's film about the largest mass suicide of the 20th century reconstructs the 1978 event. The Reverend Jim Jones forced nearly a thousand followers of his People's Temple sect to drink poison in the settlement of Jonestown, Guyana, South America. A third of them were children. Jan Bušta gives sadists, voyeurs, and necrophiliacs one minute to leave the cinema. His self-reflective documentary, which is the result of ten years of time-lapse filming, does not depict dramatic scenes. To the sound of an audio recording from that fateful day, we see a collage of child ghosts preaching about escaping the corruption of the world.“In his debut film, Jan Bušta, ‘in a live broadcast’ brings us an electrifying experience of demagogy and manipulation. a-B-C-D-e-F-G-H-i-JONESTOWN is also a cinephile tribute to film experiment milestones, ‘demagogically manipulating’ with all elements of film narration and audience’s expectations.”---Source: https://www.filmcenter.cz/files/files/1645626325_czech-documentaries-2021-2022.pdf

Adam Ondra ranks among the best sport climbers in the world, demonstrating breathtaking hand-feet coordination whilst scaling natural rocks and artificial walls. Shot over the course of three years, this documentary follows Adam Ondra as he gets ready for the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. The multi world champion spends most of his days training and has neither the time nor the disposition to stop for long conversations. Instead, his ripped muscles and girlfriend Iva do all the talking for him. While Adam climbs up to soaring heights, wins races, and faces increasing pressure from the media and his sponsors, Iva has sacrificed her own climbing career to keep him off the ground. This film of intimate human intricacies and spectacular natural formations explores the limits of physical prowess and partner proximity. “Only by involving Iva in Adam's story were we able to give the film deeper meaning and more substance beyond just sports and view Adam from a different angle through the eyes of his closest companion.” (Petr Záruba)   --- Zdroj citátu:  https://www.dokrevue.cz/clanky/adam-ondra-posunout-hranice  

The queen, or mother, bee, drones and workers. Industriousness, togetherness, and selflessness in the name of a functional community that leaves no room for egocentrism. This poetic essay depicts the fascinating world of beehives, the layouts of which are an example to human society. Through observations of insects and conversations with beekeepers, as well as references from Radomil Hradil's book Bees and Their World, we learn that the bee, objectively the most important creature on Earth, has become an endangered species due to the actions of mankind, whose greed and selfishness may lead to its destruction. It’s clear, however, that all will turn out well for Earth, with or without humanity…

“A burned-out group of Brno intellectuals decides to go to Kolochava in Ukraine to perform ‘A Ballad for a Bandit’ there.” With these words, the author's collective presents their film, in which they use primarily documentary imagery to compose a lyrical grotesque about an epochal trip, which might be their goal. But it doesn't have to be. The main tool of expression here is the film’s edit, which places various shots, statements, and meanings next to each other, often in a sort of productive conflict. Just like in a poem, the “poetic function” of art and its ability to serve as the primary tool for expressing beauty is manifested in full force before our very eyes.“So right now I’m hoping that even the second film in the story could have a certain je ne sais quoi to it in spite of fate. And that there's something more left to be said, mainly through cinematic language. I'm dreaming of another film to continue the story.”---Source: https://www.lidovky.cz/orientace/kultura/zbojnicka-odysea-reziser-vladimir-moravek-pracuje-na-celovecernim-filmu-nikola-suhaj.A190823_144814_ln_kultura_jto

Miko is a truck driver, his father is Romani, and above all he is a man who wanted to help those in need. When the Czech government was looking for reasons not to take in a few dozen children from Greek refugee camps after the chemical attacks on Syrian civilians in 2018, Miko took justice into his own hands and, together with the Czechs Helping initiative, prepared facilities for child refugees. However, government officials gave priority to political interests. Will parliamentary elections and a change of ministries save the situation? An unflattering but accurately portrayal of the Czech Republic as a country that will only offer a helping hand when it is worthwhile. “The country today doesn’t actually allow you to act according to your conscience.”

A visually arresting interactive exploration of a space that represents the recesses of the mind and soul, lost in the dips of depressive and anxious states. The autobiographical narrative is a composition of fragments of stories and descriptions of inner turmoil, drawing the audience into an elaborate world of sometimes illustrative, sometimes metaphorical animations and ingenious sound design to understand the causes and experience of depression, the struggle to break out of its darkness, and the feelings of futility and heaviness. Open, almost diaristically intimate notes navigate the journey through rooms, floors and different environments that embody the manifestations of inner heaviness.

Petr Michal‘s meditative documentary follows the current life of an esteemed Czech literary translator, Anna Karenina. The film largely treats the relationship with her late husband, poet Petr Kabeš, and the feeling of loneliness she has been facing since his death. It is definitely not a conventional documentary portrait, since the director does not ask questions, and instead lets Karenina voice out her thoughts and feelings, observing her with a casual camera during work or on her mountaineering trips. The film also serves as an implicit proof of love to analogue medium: not only the book, but analogue film as well, with its invisible, yet almost tangible features.“I know that loneliness is a sort of a task, it is here for me to do or finish what we once agreed to act upon with Petr, and, as a matter of fact, what I negotiated with fate.” — Anna Karenina

Even before the pandemic, there were almost 24,000 homeless people in the Czech Republic. In the following months, many more Czechs faced housing crisis due to the increase in the unemployment rate. Filip, a social work student from Prague experiences their reality first hand. The protagonist of a video journal was shooting in the streets of Ústí nad Labem. In the hot summer days, his existence shrank to finding a mere place to sleep and a meal to eat. Growing tiredness and apathy are temporarily brightened by joyful moments of human solidarity and warm meals. In such circumstances, things like that are not at all common; they represent a means of survival.“An autobiographical video journal of a social worker who decided to spend a week in the street of an unknown city. Is home a place inside or outside?”---Source: by author

Jakub Strach aka NobodyListen is a successful Czech DJ and music producer. A portrait of his life and work can be seen as a manifesto of the millennial club-going generation. After hundreds of shows and preparations for the upcoming, renowned Addict party, the DJ must deal with the consequences of inflicting a wound scarring his image. Footage from the club backstage mingles with scenes of everyday life in which NobodyListen ponders the dark sides of the club scene, like drugs and misogyny. During the shooting, the Covid pandemic strikes, revealing the insecurities of work in culture.“I was no wonder child, and as it often goes in life, a great part has been filled by chance and luck.”---Source: Interview on the Aktuálně.cz, 30. 10. 2019. Available at: https://magazin.aktualne.cz/nobodylisten-drogy-dnes-teenagerum-prijdou-cool-oslavuji-je/r~6b347e0cf9aa11e982ef0cc47ab5f122/

The film is an inquiry into contemporary forms of alternative models of partnerships. For many protagonists, polyamory, open marriage or long-term lover-to-lover relationships present a fulfilling life style, but also a struggle with misunderstanding of the society or conflicts within their own relationships. The director follows the development of relations of her protagonists over several years, while in intimate talks, she searches for the joy, striving and insecurities brought along by such unusual faces of love, revealing a need for redefining partnership in our times.“Partnerships strongly influence our lives. As a filmmaker, I am interested in how our personal lives reflect the times, and also how our personal lives change the times,” says Jana Počtová.

Two new flatmates are not even looking for an exit from the lockdown - which becomes more of a backdrop outside the windows of a one-bedroom Prague apartment. Shot on an ever present handheld camera, the reality of the (non)passing time of the pandemic slowly reveals itself. As the protagonists mutually confess and unmask each other over past unfulfilled relationships, we witness how they naturally complement one another in the household. The look inward, at ordinary events, gradually transforms the apartment into an autonomous world of imagination and song. The film thus serves as a manifesto of creation as an escape from an otherwise closed-up world. With giddy exaggeration, the emerging friendship opens up more general questions of the human need for social interaction and sharing life.

The primary motif of the documentary is the journey. A metaphorical journey, a spiritual journey, a tangible journey, a forest path, a road, a sidewalk, a drug trip, or a journey abroad. The director pastes together a collage of micro-stories of people and places that comment on the journey. Her documentary oscillates between playful absurdism, existentialism and existential questions, environmentalism, and social commentary. The dynamism and rhythm of the narrative are then determined by the jumps between different forms of video, such as analogue film, digital film, and mobile phone filming.“I think there's this idea of adventure, that you go somewhere straight, and you don’t know where you're going. It doesn’t matter where you go, as long as you get somewhere.” — Roman Prahl, art historian

On the one hand, the multi-layered film functions as an autobiographical portrait of a non-binary person, but at the same time it presents the wide range of difficulties and joys that trans and non-binary people in the Czech Republic go through. The personal is political in this film, which is why the kaleidoscope of situations includes intimate conversations with their mother over fried schnitzels, shots from Ride of the Kings, costumed festivities in the Slovácko region, talking about their coming out around the fire, and serious topics of discriminatory Czech legislation regarding trans people. The informal character of the film is enhanced by authentic interviews and handheld camera footage accompanying the lives of the protagonists.

This documentary film, which is based on the field-recording research method, gives space to the physical places where important energy, natural, and political processes take place. The director, musicians Václav Havelka and Pan Throrarensen, philosopher Lukáš Likavčan, and field-recordists Sara Pinheiro and Magnús Bergson all ask the question: “What are sounds that we don’t attach any importance to in our everyday lives trying to tell us and how can they predict the sequence of events that affects our lives?” Here, sound becomes a tool that can oftentimes capture geological time better than an image.“The aim of this Czech-Icelandic art project is to focus primarily on future critical infrastructure and breaking points through sound.” — Ivo Bystřičan---Source: https://www.ceska-krajina.cz/2869/zvuky-prirody-v-rezervaci-velkych-kopytniku-dnes-nahravali-umelci-v-ramci-mezinarodniho-projektu/  

This documentary film, which is based on the field-recording research method, gives space to the physical places where important energy, natural, and political processes take place. The director, musicians Václav Havelka and Pan Throrarensen, philosopher Lukáš Likavčan, and field-recordists Sara Pinheiro and Magnús Bergson all ask the question: “What are sounds that we don’t attach any importance to in our everyday lives trying to tell us and how can they predict the sequence of events that affects our lives?” Here, sound becomes a tool that can oftentimes capture geological time better than an image.   “The aim of this Czech-Icelandic art project is to focus primarily on future critical infrastructure and breaking points through sound.” — Ivo Bystřičan   --- Source: https://www.ceska-krajina.cz/2869/zvuky-prirody-v-rezervaci-velkych-kopytniku-dnes-nahravali-umelci-v-ramci-mezinarodniho-projektu/

This operatic documentary takes on an unconventional approach as it covers the life story of Czechoslovak composer Jan Kapr (1914–1988). The once-celebrated composer who was favored by the communist regime was, nonetheless, eventually silenced and erased from history during the 1970s. The film makes use of Kapr's musical scores as well as amateur film shots and, with the help of a playful Dadaist libretto, reveals his life and work, set against the backdrop of historical change. The behind-the-scenes footage from a choir recording deconstructs the biographical genre and shows us how difficult it can be to interpret archival material, memories, and linear narratives.  

Ondřej, a student and teacher; Denisa, a lawyer; and Petr, a policeman, are all Romani who have enjoyed a world of opportunity in Britain, something that’s hard for them to come by in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This multi-layered, yet rather intimate documentary, which contains a number of scenes shot by the protagonists themselves on their mobile phones, depicts the everyday worries and small victories of the three main characters who represent an educated and ambitious, yet still vulnerable community of Europeans, and who help embrace the opportunities offered to others. In addition to exploring themes of displacement and the search for one's own identity in a post-Brexit world, the film – which features humanism interspersed throughout – also asks how the characters’ fates were shaped by the COVID-19 epidemic.“The film has developed over the past 4 years. The pandemic forced us to adopt a new filming concept of using iPhones to record our protagonists' lives with intimate access, which presented an opportunity to reveal the community from the inside. The choice of the equipment was designed to ensure they could easily get used to the camera, and this material has quickly become the core of the film, with crew-generated material available for flashbacks to the pre-Covid era.”---Source: https://www.cinelinkindustrydays.com/2021-docu-talents-from-the-east/one-more-question

Štefan Pongo and his family left the Czech Republic for Britain to escape racial stereotypes and discrimination. To have a normal life. And they did—that is, until he decided to respond on the internet to the racist rhetoric of Czech President Miloš Zeman. The truck driver’s fate then took a major turn. The sensitively conceived personal and family portrait is a film-argument that juxtaposes simplistic, chauvinistic assessments with a full-blooded picture in which race issues are more of a problem to be solved than a lived reality. It tells the story of a journey there and back, across countries, beliefs, and our conscience.“I was wondering how the Roma who had emigrated to the UK were doing, so I went there and tracked down a trucker named Štefan Pongo and his big, wonderful family.”---Source: http://www.romea.cz/cz/kultura/premiera-dokumentarniho-filmu-pongo-calling-probehne-v-patek-na-mezinarodnim-filmovem-festivalu-docfest-v-sheffield  

Even after more than 25 years since the dreadful war crimes had been taking place in former Yugoslavia, this tragic history is far from over – be it for the victims’ families, conflicting nations or for a Czech investigator who comes back to the region to carry on in his work after so many years. The documentary return voyage follows not only the paths of fleeing war criminals, but is driven by an effort to capture a part of the ethic mission of the then newly formed International Criminal Court in The Hague along, in its double nature: based on an independent investigation of war crimes, to strive for reconciliation in cases of multifarious ethnic, national and other conflicts.“The International Criminal Court has successfully condemned only a small part of war criminals in former Yugoslavia – one hundred of the conflict’s major perpetrators carrying either military or political responsibility. Naturally, these solved cases definitely retain a symbolic meaning.”---Source: https://www.denik.cz/ze_sveta/jugoslavie-valka-chorvatsko-20210815.html  

Even after more than 25 years since the dreadful war crimes had been taking place in former Yugoslavia, this tragic history is far from over – be it for the victims’ families, conflicting nations or for a Czech investigator who comes back to the region to carry on in his work after so many years. The documentary return voyage follows not only the paths of fleeing war criminals, but is driven by an effort to capture a part of the ethic mission of the then newly formed International Criminal Court in The Hague along, in its double nature: based on an independent investigation of war crimes, to strive for reconciliation in cases of multifarious ethnic, national and other conflicts.“The International Criminal Court has successfully condemned only a small part of war criminals in former Yugoslavia – one hundred of the conflict’s major perpetrators carrying either military or political responsibility. Naturally, these solved cases definitely retain a symbolic meaning.”---Source: https://www.denik.cz/ze_sveta/jugoslavie-valka-chorvatsko-20210815.html

The northernmost city in the world, Longyearbyen, is the most populated settlement in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. A Czech social anthropologist attempts to make a new home for herself here with her family whilst also researching social transformations in the local community. The loss of jobs in the mining industry, as well as the complicated relationship between Norwegian natives, foreign immigrants, and tourists all contribute to the city's change of atmosphere whilst the surrounding snowy mountains melt and avalanches threaten the daily existence of the local population. This portrait of the microcosm of an ice town is a raw glimpse into the contemporary globalized world.“Still, such charm carries a risk. Since if everybody came here to enjoy the clarity and space, soon there’d be neither.”  

“Try to describe what it's like to see,” one of the blind actors in Jana Ševčíková's documentary urges the film crew. The same challenge for him is to express how reality is perceived and experienced by a visually impaired person. Ševčíková therefore does not explain the blindness. Using everyday situations as examples, she empathetically and without pathos presents the stories of six people who never stop dreaming, yearning, and searching for ways to be as free in life as the sighted majority. They find sources of energy in work, sports, dance, and relationships. We are also transported into their world by the dimly lit black and white camera and the layered soundtrack."What doesn't kill you makes you stronger don't be afraid."

A poetic story of a proletarian couple’s relationship during the years of economic crisis and unemployment – of all the films directed by E. F. Burian, the film Chceme žít (We Want to Live, 1949) is probably his worst. The intention to create a powerful work of cinema that would combine modern means of expression with the ideological canons of socialist realism failed completely. Ježek and Tarnovski discovered these „shambles“ and tried to rebuild a structure out of the hopelessness and futility of life. Ježek has photochemically “transcribed” selected passages with the greatest possible degree of humility towards the work of the great avant-gardist, Tarnovski similarly makes the soundtrack visible. The improvised encounter of sound and image in dialogic mode can lead to various misunderstandings resulting in ambiguous compromise.“…when I read the book of the same name, written by Karel Nový in the 1930s, I couldn't imagine (…) aside from all the coitus and abortions, nothing happens there (…) the capitalists are terrible (…) slight hints of some psychology when the heroes decided whether or not to steal, whether or not to fuck around, whether or not to beg. (…) they wonder only for a moment whether they are worthy of their place among their comrades, but of course only for a moment…”