On the Island of Cormorants

Paľo Bielik / Czechoslovakia / 1946 / Czech Premiere / 17 min.

synopsis

The adventurous expedition of Paľo Bielik and his companions into the wilderness of the Danube meadow below Bratislava.

The cultural film On the Island of Cormorants is the last film by documentary filmmaker Paľo Bielik for the company Nástup. And it’s a promising documentary that already clearly reveals boys’/boyish values, a sense of story, self-irony, and photogeny in capturing natural environments: - typical features of Bielikְ’s directing style. The film depicts the adventurous expedition of the filmmakers to the floodplain forest below Bratislava. And it is in a sense double-coded, because it captures with equal interest the fauna of the Danube basin, and the filmmakers’ “wild game”.

biography

Paľo Bielik (1910–1983)
The most successful embodiment of Janosik to this day, also a founding figure of Slovak film directing activities – the author of Wolves’ Lairs and Captain Dabac decided to pursue a career as a director in 1942, after a few years of acting at the National Theatre. In Nástup, he made approximately a dozen documentaries, some of which already bear his dashing “boyish” writing style.