The film was in the main competition of the 2019 Karlovy Vary IFF, where it won three awards, before going on to win top prizes at Cottbus and Trieste, and winning five main awards at the 2020 Sun in a Net Awards.
The film tells the story of a 40-year-old guest-worker in Germany, who discovers that back home in Slovakia his teenage son has become involved with a nationalist group, when he is accused of bullying and killing a classmate at his high school. The father starts searching for the truth about what happened.
“I am interested in the theme of an ordinary man, one out of millions, who takes part in the mass xenophobic soul with his own tiny, ignorant particle, when he is confronted with the consequences of hatred in a hard way, through events that occur in his own family. I am interested in the confrontation between the world of the individual and his family with the world of our great big human family. And the realisation that correctness is not just a word, but that it also means something, that human values are above the individual and his own fear, frustration, his own arse,” Škop said.
The film, which has a budget of 783,000 EUR, is a Slovak and Czech coproduction from Artileria, the Slovak TV and Negativ. It received support from the Slovak Audiovisual Fund, the Czech Film Fund, Slovak Radio and TV, the Czech TV and Eurimages.
Principal photography took place from January through March 2018. The film was picked up by French sales agent Loco Films.
Škop’s debut feature film Eva Nová (Artileria and Sirius Films (CZ), Filmpark production (SK), Rozhlas a televízia Slovenska (SK), with the support of the Slovak Audiovisual Fund, the Czech Film Fund, the MEDIA Programme, the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic) was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize at the Toronto IFF and selected as Slovakia’s bid for the 2017 Oscars. Skop is a graduate of the Academy of Performing Arts VŠMU in Bratislava and is the producer/director of two multiple award-winning full-length documentary films.
Production Information:
Producer:
Artileria (Slovakia)
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Coproducers:
Negativ Production (Czech Republic)
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Slovak TV (Slovakia)
Credits:
Director: Marko Škop
Scriptwriter: Marko Škop
DoP: Ján Meliš
Editor: František Krähenbiel
Sound: Jan Čeněk
Costumes: Katarína Hollá
Cast: Milan Ondrík, Daniel Fischer, Csongor Kassai, František Beleš, Zuzana Konečná, Ľubomír Paulovič, Anikó Vargová
