The prestigious film festival in Cannes will be entering its sixty-sixth year next week on Wednesday, May 15th and two Czech films will be presented in the Cinéfondation section, dedicated to young filmmakers and their short films: Eliška Chytková’s Ham Story and Matúš Vizár’s Pandas.
Czech cinematography will once again be represented at the Marché du Film film market by the Czech Film Center pavilion, which will be used to present Czech film, film news, possibilities of co-productions with foreign producers and services provided to foreign film crews. The pavilion will also be used as base for Czech producers, who will be able to meet with foreign distributors and the representatives of festivals in its spaces. The pavilion will be shared with the Slovak Film Institute and those who are interested can find it in a prestigious part of the market, Village International, under number 133. The pavilion’s partners are the Audiovisual Producers’ Association, Barrandov Studio, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and Tomas Bata University in Zlín.
At this year’s festival there will be Czech representation for the first time in Doc Corner, a programme which began last year. The Czech Film Center submitted 12 new Czech documentaries to the Doc Corner videotheque, thereby ensuring that they will be available for viewing by any of the market’s accredited visitors for the entire duration of the festival. The following films will be shown in Doc Corner this year: Váňa, Vojta Lavička: Up and Down, Life with Jester, Crooks, Story of Mr. Love, Year without Magor, Nazareth – Until We Drop, Bohemian is all Greek to me, Velvet Terrorists, Věra 68 and Love in the Grave. The Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival submitted two films (New Life and Fortress). This year the Jihlava festival will have its own representation in Doc Corner in the form of a stand along with other festivals united in Doc Alliance and with a portal for the distribution of documentary films, Doc Alliance Films, which is headquartered in the Czech Republic. The Doc Alliance Selection award will also be presented in Cannes as part of the Doc Brunch, a social gathering for more than two hundred film professionals.
A programme similar to the Doc Corner videotheque, though dedicated to short films, is also operating in Cannes under the name Short Film Corner, whose videotheque has been operating as a paid service since 2004. This year, for the first time, the Czech Film Center will be presenting its collection of short films coming out on the Czech Short Films 2013 DVD, specifically M.O., Big Honza, Tereza Dravtová, Born 1989, In Vino Veritas, Office Workers, Paradigm, The Trip, Wallachian Rugby and The Last Summer.
The programme will also be supplemented with Where do the Wild Butterflies Grow? and House 66b, which Zlín’s Faculty of Multimedia Communication at Tomas Bata University submitted.
Czech participation in the official festival programme this year is provided by two short animated films in the Cinéfondation section, in which the commission selected eighteen films from more than 1550 applicants from 277 schools from all over the world. The Czech Film Center submitted the first of these, Ham Story, to the section.
“The inclusion of the film Ham Story in the selection of the Cinéfondaton section is extremely gratifying for us because when we started issuing the DVD collections of short films four years ago and intensively cooperating with festivals in the area of short films, one of the goals was to help Czech films break though to international short film festivals and, of course, that includes the most prestigious ones such as Cannes. And the fact that there are two Czech films there this year is absolutely fantastic,” commented Markéta Šantrochová from the Czech Film Center.
The film tells the story of what can happen when a child gets in the position of a god and transforms the boring and grey world to something more along childlike lines. This slightly surrealistic film originated as a production of Tomas Bata University. Director Eliška Chytková said that the film arose from pure joy. “And at the moment when you can check yourself out from reality like that, you start to see the surrounding world differently. Smokestacks start to twist and turn, bare tree branches are covered all over in colourful clouds and not even people stay the same. Most of all I like to make fun of them. These ideas are only visible inside our heads, and that is the reason Ham Story was created. In order to awake such a fantasy world in the viewer as well, since we bring balance to the world through fantasy,” stated the filmmaker, describing the method in which her film originated. “The fact that my film made it to Cannes is primarily a huge motivation for me, and a confirmation that this path is the right one. And in addition to that, yippee and yoohoo and huge elation,” she stated.
The second film is the ten-minute-long Pandas. The film originated from an idea that Pandas actually want to go extinct, but mankind continues to try to save them, even though they don’t want to be saved. The graduate work from FAMU student Matúš Vizár is, in the filmmaker’s words, a satirical view of everything possible, even of the monumental question of the meaning of life.
The director himself commented on the success of the film as follows: “I am relatively pleased and I am curious as to what the festival will bring. Even now it means increased attention for the film and I am presented, faster than expected, with the question of what I want to do next.”
This year producer Viktor Tauš was chosen as the Czech representative in the Producer on the Move programme, which is being organised by European Film Promotion, of which the Czech Film Center is a member. Each year the programme selects several promising producers, who receive the opportunity to offer their prepared projects to an international professional public, thereby acquiring valuable contacts and possibly even offers for cooperation.
Viktor Tauš was born in 1973 in Prague. At the age of nineteen he was accepted at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he studied documentary film. In 2006 he formed the Fog’n’Desire production company together with Michal Kollár with the goal of producing feature films about strong themes with an orientation on both the local and the international markets. In 2011 he produced the film The House from director Zuzana Liová, which was screened at forty film festivals including Berlinale and Palm Springs, where it even won the main prize in the New Voices category. He is currently completing two films: Jan Hřebejk’s Honeymoon and Clownwise, which he himself is directing, and he is also preparing a new film: Red Captain, based on a book by Dominik Dán, which his colleague Michal Kollár will be directing.
Cinefondation Screenings:
Ham’s Story (Cinefondation) Directed by Eliška Chytková’s (Thursday, May 23, 11:00 salle Buñuel)
Pandas (Cinefondation) directed by Slovak talentMatúš Vizár (Friday, May 24, 11:00 salle Buñuel)
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Information Courtesy of Czech Film Centre
