Czech films - experimental

An intimate soliloquy about memory, dreams and anxiety, which takes on the form of a therapeutic dialogue, is the prelude to the footage of an original dance performance in which the movements of the dancer and her double are gently desynchronised. The artist's voice, in a distinctly stereophonic recording, interprets a text based on her diary.

Fragments of a daily routine – sleep, coffee, food, pills and shots of the inhospitable view from the window – are listed in the dictionary entry explaining the term “acedia”, a spiritual apathy manifested by a paralyzing indifference to oneself and one's surroundings. In this stop-motion animation, it takes the form of a blinking cursor on a blank computer screen, layers of reality that are peeling back, and a dying houseplant.

Cosmic horror explores the elements and matter of so-called inanimate nature, which become actors and form a new ecosystem. A stream of depictions of fluid materials embedded into each other is accompanied by an unsettling soundtrack that reinforces the uncertainty of whether we are watching a cosmogonic or eschatological vision.

The tourist appeal of ethically problematic destinations is a phenomenon known as dark tourism. The filmmakers' itinerary for their tour of Norway included sites such as the robust sculptures of Gustav Vigeland, criticised for their proximity to Nazi aesthetics, wind farms making Sami pastures inaccessible, and the island of Utøya. Using performative and post-production gestures, they have attempted to come to terms with the plight of dark tourists.

This film essay about cinematographic methods of conquering the African continent uses excerpts from letters exchanged between Zlín and Nairobi between the head of the film group Jaroslav Novotný and the travel and filmmaking duo Miroslav Zikmund and Jiří Hanzelka. The subtle manipulation of the footage from their film Africa I. – From Morocco to Kilimanjaro (1952) highlights the subversive potential of the gaze fixed directly on the camera.

The experience of a gradual descent down the spiral of exhaustion, lined with pharmaceutical pick-me-ups, is told in images that combine stop-motion with other animation techniques. An autobiographical account of the experience is interwoven with a Taoist story about the powerful lord of chaos Hun Tun, interpreted by the author's voiceover.

What does a drone pilot operating on a peacekeeping mission in an unnamed country see on his monitor? We are slowly getting used to the stream of variously distorted images of so-called strategic targets. Along with the ability to see human beings, animals and landscapes in crumbling shapes, sensitivity to who is watching is increasing. The poem Three Economic Units by Tomáš Čada is the source for the film.

A dazzling pyramid made of sugar cubes has been created next to the entrance to the underground realm of forest ants at the base of a tree. It has become an object of interest to the surrounding myrmecofauna and other occasional visitors from insect circles. Captured in thirteen chapters, the disintegration of the white structure is recorded by a camera with a macro lens focused on the gradually emerging structure created by the ants’ drudgery.

This intimate portrait of a girl's friendship for the ages stretches the interval between childhood and adulthood, play and seriousness, reality and fiction. In this edited documentary, photographs from domestic archives are interwoven with camera-less animation. The flow of images is carried along by a lazily flowing river, which the protagonists eventually dive into due to the hot weather.

Voice, face, body and whip. In a tense monologue, a girl looks back at the long shadow cast by the act of rape, which has materialized in the surprising form of an all-too-vivid whip. Slowly receding, the camera zooms out to accompany the moment when she manages to unclench her fist, rid herself of the powerful instrument and speak in her own voice.

The moment just after waking up, in which the outlines of the dream reality dissolve into three dots behind the sentence “I had a dream that…,” gives a glimpse into the consciousness of a person suffering from short-term memory loss. A collage composed of home movies and shots of abandoned urban landscapes traces fragments of family memory that dissolve into dreams and once inhabited sites of the unconscious.

Hidden under the moss, the performer's motionless body breathes shallowly, moss growing over her, while the subtitles describe the gradual disappearance of heaviness, desire and consciousness.

Plans, visualizations, archival photographs and contemporary shots of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's New National Gallery in Berlin – a perfect cube of glass and steel – melt, intertwine and deform in the reflection of Miroslav Haldina's musical accompaniment. The relationship between music and architecture is also the main theme of the conversation between artificial intelligence and man, with the participants in the dialogue also bound together by an unsettling symmetry.