Translucent Being: Pavel Koutecký

Marriage is a journey into the future; in Pavel Koutecký's documentary passages, lovers walk from the wedding altar into the animated world of Michaela Pavlátová. The blossoming presence of one soul and two bodies turns into an arid, icy desert of separate bedrooms, disillusionment and traps.

People have always had problems with the sky, just like the hero of this student portrait, a modern-day Icarus, photographer and artist who floats on his hang glider above the ant-like everyday life of humans. In the clouds, people aren’t packed together like in the trams below; there is silence, peace and the stretching of time, a place where each of us is special.

The screening of Citizen Havel will be followed by a Café Evropa debate "Activism in a passive society?" organized by Europeum and the European Parliament. The speakers will be Stanislav Daniel and Michaela Šojdrová. Moderated by Viktor Daněk. The debate will be held in Czech. The Q&A after the screening is part of Café Europe programme organized by Europeum and the EU Parliament. The debate is hosted by Viktor Daněk accompanied by guests Stanislav Daniel, Lucie Bílková and Michaela Šojdrová. Q&A is held in Czech. A time-lapse portrait of President Václav Havel, completed by Miroslav Janek after Koutecký's tragic death, looks behind the scenes of the changing post-revolutionary society between 1992 and 2003. It revolves around the everyday life of a citizen who went from being the director of the Velvet Revolution to the protagonist of an absurd theatrical performance. This intimate testimony to the transformation of Havel's social role presents an image of the dissident in high politics as a relic of the times. With the emerging sharks of the new millennium, the bearer of hope becomes a lightning rod of social frustration at unfulfilled expectations, a symbol of an unattainable moral ideal that must still be striven for. “We are entering an era of stable democracy, characterised by a system of a certain separation of powers. I am far from being the leader of a nation that decides everything and speaks into everything.” – Václav Havel

This magical-poetic portrait of Prague, Vienna and Ljubljana buildings by the Slovenian architect and urban planner is a pictorial essay, love letter, chronicle and prayer all in one. The elementary shapes of the sky-reaching stone, lyrically dressed in light and shadow, envelop the intimate space of Plečnik's work and Czechoslovak history. Prague Castle, which he was placed in charge of restoring, becomes a meeting point of historical stages, regimes and hearts. One of them belongs to Alice, the daughter of T. G. Masaryk, who writes love letters to Plečnik.

Glass alchemists Josef Rozínek and René Roubíček breathe life into a glass idea. In a friendly struggle between hands and brain, matter and soul, form and content, they shape an invisible fluid that fills transparent heads, speaking with crystal life.

Seeing a bee under a microscope is like touching a dream. Shamans in white coats at the Institute of Scientific Instruments in Brno reveal the haptic dimension of scientific research. They shape ideas, cross the boundaries of matter, let life into the arteries of wires and the metal body of an artificial child, an electron lithograph.

What is the truth, and what is its colour, number and face? This is examined by edited slapstick on the eve of the first free elections in Czechoslovakia in 1990. In the orchestra of a newly post-totalitarian history, a new era is resounding. In a swarm of posters, slogans and proclamations, it is overlooked by a flock of people converging on the statue of Jan Hus with the executioner riding past in a red hood.

This time-lapse philosophical-historical excursion into the first decade of post-Soviet democracy, through the mouths of Jan Ruml, Michael Kocáb, Martin Mejstřík and Kryštof Rímský, speaks about the freedom of the individual and society. All of them are united by their participation in the Velvet Revolution, their dissatisfaction with the subsequent political development and the question of how to live in it and not betray oneself. What is frustrating is not freedom itself, but the search for the points that delimit it.“People had a huge expectation that allowed them to survive the frustration of freedom; when the expectation was not met, social depression set in.”

Olympic athlete with mental disabilities Bronislav Zemek is not a flower in a greenhouse, but an example of raw unbridled humanity. Roman Sejkot's collage of expressive photographs, which won the World Press Photo Award in 1994, looks into a disturbingly spontaneous, grotesquely free world without masks and social barriers.

The Fourth Munich, the burning circus or surrender to reality – this is what some politicians have called the discussion of the law on the dissolution of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, which took place at the end of 1992. The camera capturing this event is not a fly on the wall, but an intrusive mosquito in whose presence politicians fall out of role and reveal their true colours. Not only a funeral procession for the deceased brotherhood, but also a bust of T.G. Masaryk passes through the former Federal Assembly building. The velvet divorce of a Czechoslovak marriage that lasted seventy-four years is thus also a ghost story about the demise of Czechoslovak statehood and the country's uncertain future in chaos. “Parliament has become an environment for the inflation of words, a place for the discharge of unsubstantiated ambitions, a laboratory for personal bitterness.” — Jan Ruml

Double nationalization and triple totalitarianism surround the lives of two Czech Jews who found a new home in Chile during World War II. A capitalist and a communist find themselves in a fictional dispute over the true image of totalitarianism. But this lies beyond the historical experience of the individual, in the joint preparation of the Chilean production of Brundibár.