Special Event

Ten-year-old Wo Tu dreams of having a water pistol like other boys in his village. Even though his father promised, he fails to bring one from the city. But there is one hope for Wo Tu: his dying grandfather assures him to grant him the wish as a ghost. After his death, the old man visits the boy in his dreams, initiating a treasure hunt. Soon, the limits between reality and dream, past and present, become more and more blurred. A portrait of the profound love for the land, across three generations of a family in modern Chinese rural life.

For most of the 20th century, mass physical education events took place at various intervals in the Strahov stadium, from which many audio and film titles have been preserved. A closer look reveals that these are valuable comparative materials, telling us a lot not only about the changes in exercise as a result of the replacement of the all-soccer meetings by Spartakiádas, but also about the audio and audiovisual techniques that provided the desired publicity for these state-sponsored events. Listening to the radio sounds of the mass exercises, the two-hour tape will encourage you to follow the audio dimension of the projected film images, where you will learn about the depiction of the rallies and Spartakiadás as both world and regional events at the same time, and last but not least, your attention will be captivated by the stylized representation of the child and army drill sergeants, whose strong representation in the sounds and films cannot be ignored. Tomáš Dufka, from the Czech Radio Archive, and Terezie Hlaváčková and Alena Šlingerová, from the National Film Archive, will guide you through a selection of radio reports and film documentaries from 1938–1965. In addition to broadcasts by the leading radio reporters Miloslav Disman, Franta Kocourek, and Josef Cincibus, the programme will also include reports from the 1965 Spartakiáda by the then editors of Czechoslovak, Radio Zdeněk Svěrák and Miloň Čepelka. The film part will offer, among other things, selections from Martin Frič’s documentaries on the 10th All-Sokol Meeting (1938) and the first national Spartakiada (1955), as well as Václav Hapl’s documentary Concerto grosso, on the military parade at the 3rd Spartakiáda (1965). The programme is followed by a public listening of the podcast series ČRo Plus Rozehra at the Horácké divadlo.

Charles Richard Johnson, known to all as Dick, is a psychiatrist, father of the film’s director, and a man in the twilight of his life. Death could come for him at any moment. So what is there to fear? And why not have some fun with it? The attempt to turn an often traumatic experience into something positive defines the poetics of a documentary about a person’s serious and not-so-serious final affairs. Staging the possible and highly curious deaths of an old man becomes one of the many games Dick and Kirsten play together throughout their lives, as the dementia that gradually consumes the man's mind can end his life even before his definitive end.“Part of how humans function is thanks to a healthy death denial, certainly—most humans can function for a great period of their lives in a healthy denial that they will die, that a death would be out of the norm, would be an accident, or could be self-inflicted.”Quote source: Mubi

A look at the making of Godard's last film, Scénarios is both a film about film and a film-novel. The director leafs through a notebook of handwritten notes, sketches and photographs to present his future project. The homemade book is a preparation for the shoot, but also a work of art in its own right, providing a unique insight into the mind of one of the most important filmmakers of the last century. Godard's notebook is a conversation between film, art and philosophy, and a disputation between concept and matter. The idea is nostalgically imprinted on the materiality of old media, freed from dependence on digital technology, and on the physicality, the language of the hands and the voice of the filmmaker at the end of his life.

What if you were a passer-by in the Beijing streets, a peasant hoping for the rain to fall, a steelworker in disappearing factories, a tourist on a packed beach, praying in Ningxia or Qinghai, a construction worker after an earthquake, a fisherman repairing his fishnet, or a dancer waiting to get on stage? A personal contemporary portrait of a country, a population and a society by Wang Xiaoshuai.

Twenty-seven October is the traditional UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. On this occasion, the National Film Archive, Prague, unveils a personal archive from the estate of director and screenwriter Ivan Passer. Acquired by the NFA in 2021, the extraordinary audiovisual collection contains more than 300 items – from VHS tapes, Betacam and U-Matic tapes to audio CDs and dictation tapes – and provides a rare glimpse into the creative and personal life of the renowned Czech filmmaker during his lifetime in the United States. The festival's lecture focuses on the professional processes involved in sorting and digitising Passer's archive and features exclusive extracts from his personal and professional materials – including a tribute to legendary curator Hubert Bals, which Passer conceived as a reflection on his own vision of cinema. The audience can look forward to an in-depth look at Passer's remarkable artistic legacy, as well as the complex nuances of dealing with personal archives and estates. The lecture is presented by historian Valentina Carnali and NFA curator Matej Strnad. 

The seminar includes a screening of the film A Fidai Film (K. Aljafari, 2024). The seminar provides the historical context for a series of dispossessed Palestinian films – over one hundred documentary films produced between 1968 and 1982 by filmmakers associated with the Palestinian Film Unit and the Palestinian Cinema Institute. The presentation focuses on issues related to the limited availability or complete absence of these films, re-discovering them and gaining access to them. It also provides a comprehensive overview of the current activities in the field of the digital restoration or production of new projects, concluding discussion on the need for self-determined narratives, cultural representation and memory. The speakers are the Kino Palestine collective members, Marguerite Farag and Zaher Jureidini, and NFA curator and archivist Matej Strnad moderates the discussion.

The last film, which Godard completed the day before his assisted suicide in Switzerland in September 2022, refers in its title to the fact that a work of art is both a result and a process, and that its essence is at once finite and infinite. The ideas condensed into an assemblage of images and texts are divided into two identical segments. The second, however, switches from the artistic abstract to the earthy concreteness of reality at the end, showing a half-naked Godard sitting on a bed and paraphrasing Sartre's text. In his final self-portrait, the artist contrasts the passing body with the immortality of thought, transforming life and death into an endless artistic gesture. “He’s filming himself transcribing Jean-Paul Sartre’s double logical and witty apologue on non-fingers: thus ends Scénarios, as it began, with a repetition, the figure of eternal return, the moment where time, which has been the great – if not unique – question of cinema, will have ceased to flow.” Source: Roadstead

A young girl grows up on a goat farm with her many siblings. Her days consist of caring for the animals and studying the Bible. However, her family and religious upbringing set her on a life path to marriage and childbearing, but things begin to get complicated when she meets a young, likable cowboy. The film is a sensitive and intimate insight into a specific closed class of the American South, which also opens up themes of coming of age and gender roles. In this quiet portrait, authentic performances by non-actors from rural backgrounds mix with poetic imagery to create a suggestive insight into religious communities.“Man wasn't created for woman but woman for man.” Quote source: Bible, 1 Corinthians 11:09