Czech Joy

The documentary, which was part of the exhibition of the same name, captures moments of birds and people meeting together in urban space. The most glaring sign of the incongruity in such relationships is the great number of injuries with which these winged inhabitants of metropolises end up at rescue stations. Wounds and irreversible damage are inflicted on them through intentional and unintentional human activity, but also by human creations that serve the everyday functioning of society. At the other end of the spectrum, there are individuals who are not only interested in the life of birds, but also care about their welfare and, in a figurative sense, communicate with our avian companions.“Birds are made up of stories. No bird ever dies, even if it does. All birds that have ever lived have a common memory. Birds taught people how to build their cities out of rocky mountains.”Source: Galerie Jeleni

Vtáčnik is a small hill on the outskirts of Bratislava, which a few decades ago was decorated with vineyards and forests. For the director, like the other locals living there, it once represented a picturesque oasis of peace where birds took refuge. Today, however, it is being transformed beyond recognition by the cranes and excavators of property developers. Told from a detailed human and bird's eye perspective, this personal documentary composes an impartial mosaic of diverse, often conflicting accounts and ideas of what life in such a place should be like. Questions about economic concerns and the pursuit of a quality life in harmony with nature collide with the author's memories of her childhood. “My intention was not to divide people into good and bad, but to point out the system that leads people to elevate their individual interests above the common good and to enrich themselves at the expense of others.” — Eva Križková Source: Pravda Magazine

The director, a young man in his thirties going through a life crisis, approaches his estranged parents to help him paint his apartment. Conversations accompanied by a paint roller and paint thinner open up old wrongs while revealing the complexity of interpersonal relationships. The absence of communication, or the lack of will to communicate, as a symptom of contemporary family ties, stands in contrast to caring for a family of pigeons that has made its nest on the director's balcony. The film, in its civility and authenticity, follows the lessons of a book dedicated to amateur filmmakers and thus enters into a subversive dialogue with the paradigms of film pedagogy. How can we live today, how can we create?“A family portrait of a diary-like, commemorative nature is a very good lesson for a beginner.” Source: Camera tortura and the book KUČERA, Jan: Filmová tvorba amatéra

The Building Bridges project brings together perpetrators of crime with the victims of crime. Behind the walls of the prison in Jiřice near Nymburk, one such group tells stories that have fatally affected their lives in a conference room over the course of eight weeks. So-called restorative justice sees crime primarily as harm and the disruption of interpersonal relationships. It is in partnership with victims that offenders are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions. Not only is the will to listen to the other person necessary, but also the ability to consciously reflect on the causes and consequences of one's actions in a complex web of social contexts.“Restorative justice is a concept, a movement, and a modern vision of criminal justice policy that says that crime does not primarily violate legal norms, but causes harm and disrupts interpersonal relationships.”Source: Restorativní justice

The protagonist of Dajori (mother in Romani) is forty-five-year-old Marie Hučková, who lives with her husband in Varnsdorf. After her younger sister Iveta ends up on the streets with her nine children, she decides to take her own fate and theirs firmly into her own hands and attempts to break out of the vicious circle of poverty that characterises their hometown. This sensitive film, which captures three years of a newly formed family's life together, follows the small joys and daily challenges of caring for others and asks whether a mother's love can overcome the dysfunctional system in which socially excluded localities find themselves. “We realised that there was a conflict unfolding before our eyes on several levels. Firstly, there was Mary's inner contradiction, where it was unthinkable for her not to help her relatives in need, but at the same time she was aware of the negative effects of the whole situation on her and her close family. Another level of conflict then played out at the level of the city, and consequently the state. The whole event was related to the housing crisis and the business of poverty in socially excluded localities.” — Martin Páv 

Jan Merta (1952) is currently one of the most important Czech visual artists. In his painting work, shaped by the postmodernism of the 1980s, he leans towards abstract abbreviation and symbolic depiction of reality through everyday objects. The film is a snapshot of his life filled with painting, working in his garden and cohabitation with his partner. The civilian camera follows Merta as he prepares an exhibition for which he attempts to create new works. However, his engagement with the current geopolitical situation enters into the work, as well as the discovery of new compositional principles and creative otherworldliness that co-create his enchanted personal world. “Is this art, or can I throw it away?”

Dalibor, a Romani youth, returns home after two years in prison, but is forced to face a family crisis. In order to protect his younger brother Kevin from the harsh upbringing of his alcoholic father, who isn’t afraid to use physical violence, he spends all his strength helping his mother win a court case for custody of Kevin. To cope with the traumas of the past and the challenges of the present, he escapes into the magical world of a travelling circus, for it is there that he can shed all his worries and transform himself into a fearless fakir, who breathes and swallows fire. Roman Ďuriš' feature debut is a visually captivating introspection into a resilient yet fragile young man, hardened by experience and living on the fringes of society, who is determined to change his fate for the better. “I met Dalibor at the beginning of the pandemic, when we visited a small traveling circus with cinematographer Michaela Hošková. What really impressed me about him was his demeanour, a mixture of kindness and childlike naivety contrasted with pretend boyish roughness. It's amazing that despite all the traumas, he didn't become bitter, but found his own specific way to cope with the pain.” — Roman Ďuriš Source: Film New Europe

Asia and Marek bought an old house near the Bialowieza Forest in eastern Poland. The oldest forest in Europe is a refuge for them and their three children from a world gripped by many crises. They spend their days keeping bees, listening to the sounds of nature, watching bison and deer. But they are not the only ones seeking safety. In addition to the animals, people are beginning to appear in the footage from the cameras they have installed in the forest. Refugees who are not welcome in Belarus or Poland. Confused, hungry, injured. A family used to protecting all living creatures sees it as their duty to help them. Even at the risk of losing the paradise they have created.“When this humanitarian crisis started, I saw comments supporting both sides, including the policies of the Polish government. I try not to judge anything too hastily, especially if I haven’t experienced it myself, so I just asked myself: If I had a house there, would I help the refugees or not?”Source: Variety

What would you do when your home appears to be in danger? Would you stay or leave? Each day, since the beginning of the war, millions of Ukrainians are asking themselves this question. Fragile Home is an immersive experience in mixed reality, co-directed by Ondřej Moravec and Victoria Lopukhina, that poses this question to each of us. Through the medium of mixed reality, you can experience the gradual transformation of your familiar surroundings into the dwelling of a Ukrainian family, spanning from the peaceful beginning of the past to the tumultuous present.

Vitaly, a nuclear physicist and record holder in extreme cold-exposure training, makes his living as a bricklayer and lives below the poverty line. While his parents, prominent scientists, reminisce about the glory of the regime they willingly built, the avowed patriot from Novosibirsk is gradually changing his mind about Putin's Russia. He rejects its capitalist nature and continues, as a radicalised blogger, to advocate the establishment of a juster regime. This intergenerational clash is typical of the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. While the older generation remembers the certainties and advantages of the past regime, the younger one is hopelessly mired in a crisis of authority, rejecting past and present political representation and resorting to extreme views. Like everything else in his life, Vitaly is experiencing his political awakening in an extreme way as the son of elites relegated to the social periphery after the collapse of the empire. This time-lapse character study, filmed between 2016 and 2024, depicts how long-term frustration and disillusionment lead entire generations and social classes to gravitate towards radical solutions and vote for authoritarian leaders like Putin, Trump or Le Pen. “I'm not afraid of a coup; I'm looking forward to it. Any change will be for the better, because it can't get any worse.” 

A detailed probe into the rehearsal process of the theatre production of I, Feuerbach, based on the play by successful German playwright Tankred Dorst, presents Ivan Řezáč in the leading role of an aging master of acting. This documentary about the preparation of a production based on the principle of theatre on the stage uses filmic means to explore the meaning of the art of theatre and, in the civilian conversations among members of the ensemble outside their roles, reveals that even the actors themselves often grope for the meaning of their profession. In the process, the sometimes humorous and sometimes critical moments during the preparation of a theatrical piece reveal the many pitfalls of collective work in contemporary society.

Czech painter and artist Otto Placht (1962) is sometimes called the painter of the jungle. His creative and private life is divided between Prague and Peru, where he draws inspiration from the depths of the Amazon rainforest, ayahuasca and the local people. The film shows his creative process in the interiors of Prague and a studio built right in the rainforest. Poetic shots of nature are interspersed with the harsh realities of the big city, in which Placht's passionate love life and complicated family life are also revealed. The artist's paintings have proven to be not only a fascination with and homage to immaculate nature, but also an environmental plea for its protection. “My material base is Europe, and my spiritual space is opened by the South American rainforest. One cannot exist without the other.” Source: Czech Radio

Kinetopsia, a disorder in which one believes that static objects are in motion, serves as a metaphor for the social situation we find ourselves in: the Velvet Revolution took place thirty-five years ago, and while the opaque present continues to bring new problems, public discussion often still revolves around the hunt for the "spectre of communism". From the perspective of a young couple, we discover the fascinating project of Sylvia's abandoned Discoland and become aware of the critical moments of the political transformation that has determined the economic and cultural conditions in which we live today. "We are fighting here. Against the fucking communists, for freedom."

There are nearly twenty thousand species of them, they have been on Earth for hundreds of millions of years, and they play an indispensable role in many ecosystems. Yet lichens are usually overlooked. Ondřej Vavrečka decided to take a closer look at these fascinating organisms. His view, like the accompanying dialogue between experts Trevor Goward and Curtis Randall Björk, is both scientific and contemplative. For him, lichens represent not only a form but also a way of life. They show that an alternative to the constant expansion and reshaping of the environment can be the establishment of symbiotic communities in which every life has equal weight. “The film is shot on 16mm. We had quite a limited amount of raw material. The choice what to shoot was crucial, but not difficult. The ‘script’ didn’t stem from my personal will but from the story that lichens compose according to the shapes of their bodies.” Source: FIDMarseille

Ida is cleaning out the house that her grandfather, an artist, used to live in. She wades through a studio overflowing with artefacts, oddities and lost history. Similarly to S P A C E S, Štrbová treats the theme of memory and loss, combining fiction and documentary, letting the images of nostalgic childhood and the suffocating past flow associatively. To the sound of Francesco Geminiani's Concerto grosso no. 12, subtitled Madness, the fragile physicality of both dead and living relics stands out. The head of a dead parrot, a cast of her grandmother's breasts or a moss-covered real estate agent represent the discoveries of a personal archaeological site and exhibits of an introspective museum of family history. “I like the fact that you don’t have to deal with whether things are fiction, animation or documentary. Nowadays, such pigeonholing is unnecessary. A film is just a film.”Source: Film a doba

Ivana Svobodová, a journalist for the weekly Respekt magazine specializing in the Czech disinformation scene, does not create her reports from her desk, but in the field. She engages in clashes of opinion with people who believe in the positions propagated by bloggers like Vidlák. The plurality of opinion has been transformed by their influence into a battlefield divided into good and bad media. This confrontational portrait of the role of a liberal periodical in the era of rampant social media conspiracies with a sociological overlay discusses the impossibility of dialogue. It asks questions about the difference between opinion and fact, as well as what authority is respected by those who oppose authority and who is the watchdog of democracy.“I don't know what kind of world this is; I don't mean that politically, I mean it humanly. How often does a person get so angry that they want to insult a stranger?”

The scent trail as an evidentiary method in criminal proceedings was invented in the USSR and subsequently developed by the East German secret police and widely used against opponents of the regime. Since the 1980s, it has become a common part of police and judicial practice, even in the post-communist Czech Republic. Zuzana Piussi's latest film continues the director's investigative work dealing with the problematic construction of reality and dead ends in Central European justice. It follows the fate of people who seek retrials of unfair court proceedings and, in the wake of this, asks whether the method of proving the presence of a person at a crime scene based on the scent detected by a dog is really impartial or how it is possible that a scent trail is often sufficient as the only evidence to convict suspects, even though it is questioned by scientists.“The method takes advantage of the undoubted sensitivity and discriminating ability of dogs to identify certain substances in trace amounts and has relevance in many cases. The problem arose when the Czech judiciary and police apparatus uncritically adopted it in the practice of the post-communist justice administration and established it at the level of key evidence – in other words, if a suspect's scent trace is identified as positive, it is sufficient for a conviction without or despite other evidence.”Source: D1Film

The director Tomáš Hlaváček is loosely building upon the time-lapse documentary Housing Against Everyone, in which he captured the dispute surrounding the Rapid Re-Housing project in Brno. The topic of decent housing for families in need is also addressed in The Impossibility. People occupying rental apartments in Brno's “Kuncovka” wanted hot water, electricity and fair negotiations. Instead, they received bullying and threats from the owner, who, in his own words, “does not like coloured people”. Neither the police nor the city helped them. So they joined forces with activists and lawyers to fight for their rights. Hlaváček chronicles the months-long conflict with its legal follow-up as an engaged observer. "When I first set foot in that house, I came roughly against the gap between theoretical understanding and the real experience of extreme poverty and inequality that plunges the lot of the inhabitants into lived hopelessness. I observed a space where defending one’s own rights, let alone human dignity, is so expensive and dangerous that claiming it is tantamount to existential endangerment of self and family. At Kuncovka, I learned that to be poor is to become a commodity of abuse that no one wants to hear, because poverty is itself a guilt. It wasn’t a matter of just turning my head and pretending that this world didn’t exist." - Tomáš Hlaváček

The film presents the work of Czech journalist Martin Dorazín, who reports from war-affected areas in Ukraine. In addition to informing his compatriots about the current military situation, he travels with Ukrainian volunteers to heavily shelled towns and offers humanitarian aid to the survivors. The camera brings to light not only the demands of the correspondent's daily work, but also the specific stories of the civilian population of Ukraine and their fears and grief from the unrelenting war. These encounters with victims of Russian aggression mirror the absurdity of war and the need for empathy, which is often lacking in Czech society. “When someone in our country says they’re tired of the war, it makes me want to throw up. Because they don’t know what war is, they can't imagine it.” – Martin Dorazín

An astral comedy that shows how to resurrect one’s love for a husband, find a woman to start a family or reconcile with your father. Just go to Alaska, Greenland or Lebanon, advises Italian astrologer Luciana, who works as a psychotherapist and personal coach in her office. This touchingly real guide to emotional turmoil, human longing and hope is based on the techniques of fiction film. A layered group portrait with a polished character typology portrays a world driven by chance, disguised as mirage, self-delusion or miracle. “I dreamed of making an 'Italian' film full of passionate love, strong emotions, humour and Vespa motorcycles. But there was a catch. I'm not Italian, I don't understand the language and I have a melancholic Hungarian character combined with an ironic sense of humour.” — Peter Kerekes Source: Artcam Films

Marie Tomanová travelled from Mikulov to the USA as an au pair, and today she shoots campaigns for fashion brands such as Nike, Instagram, or for the fashion magazines such as Vogue CS. However, her name is better known abroad than in her native country, which provided few opportunities for the young painter. Paradoxically, it was only in New York, far from home, that she was able to grow up and find herself - a transition greatly supported by Marie’s partner in professional and personal life, art historian Thomas Beachdel. Tomanová touches the world in a different way, with a rush of positive emotions, an immediate connection, acting as a medium through which the energy of the portrait-sitter passes. Director Marie Dvořáková, who also relocated to the US, connects to the photographer in the same way. The portrait of the two Maries tells the story of the American dream and the search for roots, identity and home. “What I'm looking for is a moment of connection. It's more than the photos.”