Special Event

The bureaucratic machinery of the Chinese political system quickly and effectively slowed the spread of coronavirus early in the crisis, but at the cost of more rigorous control and restriction of the rights of the citizens. The film raises the question whether it is more important to preserve personal freedom of individuals during a pandemic or health of the whole society. The raw footage, secretly filmed by amateur cameramen, shows the reality of life in the closed city of Wuhan, its desolate streets and strictly guarded medical facilities. To what extent can the state interfere in the lives of its citizens when a global humanitarian disaster is at stake? “I am very pessimistic about what we will learn from this. I think that things will return to normal, people will simply take off their masks and throw them away into the rubbish bin.” Ai Weiwei

A conceptual experimental film partly inspired by the book A Thousand Plateaus by the French philosophers Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Andrea Slováková updates and ponders selected concepts of this fundamental theoretical work without an explanatory text, using only fragments of reality and a soundtrack, the individual layers of which are revealed and fragmented by the movement of the camera. Just as both thinkers argued with the dominant way of Western thinking, Slováková's film shows how to think differently in just six minutes – not through words, but through images and sounds.     Q&A with Ondřej Vavrečka, Alžběta Janáčková a Andrea Slováková:  

Vitalina Varela, a 55-year-old woman from Cape Verde, arrives in Lisbon to sort out the affairs of her husband, who moved suddenly to Portugal twenty-five years ago and died three days before she could reach him. The grim hypnotic microcosm of the now defunct Fontainhas neighborhood, through which the grieving heroine navigates in an attempt to capture whatever is left of her husband, is filled with lost souls and emptied rooms that are engulfed in stunning darkness. The imagery of Costa's suggestive portrait of the Cape Verde diaspora is underlined by static compositions and the ubiquitous chiaroscuro.   „I think she wanted to stay in this moment, this moment of mourning. She was going through the worst, most painful moment of her life and I was proposing for her to organize, to work out and reveal these terrible feelings and emotions, to turn all of it into a film.“ P. Costa