Film & Sociologie

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.

The story of a Swiss woman and a Czech man, who changed hundreds of lives.

Eva’s home is a small hill called Birdhill on the outskirts of Bratislava. During her childhood, it was still covered with historic vineyards of Maria Theresa and forest; today’s reality is cranes and excavators. In her film, she gets to know its current inhabitants and discovers that each of them lives and dreams a slightly different version of this charismatic place. Even though they live on the same hill, they cannot come together to set limits on the construction that is transforming their home unrecognizably, ruthlessly and at a breathtaking pace.

This documentary film reveals how the lives of the descendants of a partisan fighter in the Second World War are still impacted by the events of that period, 75 years after the end of hostilities. In making her case, Lacková provides glimpses into her private surroundings. Over the course of her film, she also points out frightening parallels between the reign of the Nazi terror regime and the resurgence of racist currents throughout today's Europe.

"The whole film talks about the time when I was first locked up, from sixteen till now, I’m 22 now, and during that whole time I was out maybe five months, and I’ve really had it by now. It’s also about why I’d given my life to Jesus Christ and then failed that Jesus in me because I was tempted by earthly pleasures; and it’s also about how every time I’m ready to start a new life, I get locked up again because it’s always too late. It’s just too late. That’s the greatest shame and that’s what it’s about..."

Lada is a product of "educational“ or "corrective“ institutions. Not only is he not educated or corrected, he simply does not understand anything about life. He solves his problems in his own way – by swallowing sharp objects.

How is it possible that in one country, in one half of the century, in a turbulent and unclear time, two people live not far from each other - a businessman with so-called "right-wing" views and an artist with so-called "left-wing" views, and both can be right? What is this truth and where is it to be found? Is there only one? What do these so different people have in common? What strange time was that second half of the twentieth century? These are the questions that may come to mind when watching the confrontation between two Czech Chileans, Milan Platovsky and Hanns Stein. The fate of the former could be written in the Guinness Book of Records - he is a twice-nationalised capitalist. The latter, on the other hand, has always been where the violence has come - in 1939 (Hitler), 1968 (Brezhnev) and 1973 (Pinochet) - on the other side, of course. You can meet both of them in the documentary film by Pavel Koutecký and Jan Burian, made in January 1999.

In her documentary on Hungarian-Slovak relations, Vladislava Plancíková focuses on the word "felvidék", which refers to the now non-existent northern part of Austro-Hungary. In a personal collage consisting of the stories of members of her Slovak-Hungarian family and of visual references to historical events, she follows the eventful and today often taboo history of the post-war fate of Hungarians on Slovak soil. The abstract topic grabs our interest not only through the witnesses' testimony, but also by using thre novel technique of animating real objects, including a number of contemporary and modern photographs.