Eternal Jožo, or How I Met a Star

Jan Gogola ml. / Czech Republic, Slovakia / 2020 / World Premiere / 81 min.

synopsis

"An untraditional documentary portrait reveals the complicated personality of the Slovak music legend Jožo Ráž, the singer for the pop-rock group Elán. From recordings of everyday situations, playful moments, intimate conversations about God and death, and memories of the past, the director composes a complex image of a man loved by the masses, who, despite all his life successes, feels lonely. Convinced of the importance of opening up to worlds that are foreign to us, the director shot the film over the course of ten years, succumbing to a nascent friendship, and his personal approach reveals the protagonist's civilian metaphysics, his “natural ability to live in the universe with God.”

"Filming is characterized by an ambivalence between the serious and the unserious; between sharing, rapprochement, distance, and conflict: Ráž's universe falls within a constellation of cocoa and whiskey, music and family, dictatorship and meditation, brevity and eternity, glory and screwdriver, God and nothingness, or even The Smurfs and Gargamel.” J. Gogola Jr.

Q&A with Jan Gogola ml. :

biography

Jan Gogola Jr. (1971) is a director, playwright, screenwriter and educator. His documentaries, usually reflexive or stylized, often deal with the topic of mundaneness. He won the main prize in the Czech Joy section at the 2009 Ji.hlava IDFF for his film I Love My Boring Life (2006). He has made his mark in this section several times in recent years with the films Mythmaking (2013), František of His Own Kind (2014), and Excursions (2015).