The October 26 ‘Czech Joy in the Spotlight’ industry event presented 13 of the films from this year’s crop of new Czech films at the festival (21 films were selected for Czech Joy National Competition at the festival). The Spotlight presentation by the films’ directors and producers was designed to promote the works to the professional audience in attendance, made up of festival programmers, sales agents and other interested parties.
Click for an overview of the Czech Joy in the Spotlight projects and for the wider Czech Joy festival programme.
Moderator Diana Tabakov, head of acquisitions at Doc Alliance Films, spoke to Business Doc Europe after the event, and expressed her surprise (and delight) that the pool of Czech films this year is so large, especially coming after Covid-induced lockdown. “The Czech Joy competition is presenting many more films than I remember,” she says.
The films go far and wide in endeavouring to tell their stories, such as to the UK (Leaving to Remain, Pongo Calling) and to Iceland (Invisible Landscapes). What’s more, the docs run the full gamut of subjects and aesthetic approaches, ranging from life in the Roma community (Leaving to Remain, Pongo Calling, Citizen Miko); a Czech investigator working at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (The Investigator), a doc opera (Kapr Code); a new film about the sound of climate collapse (Invisible Landscapes), and even the infamous Jonestown massacre (a-B-C-D-e-F-G-H-i-Jonestown). And much more besides.
And, yes, life during lockdown as well, but only one of this year’s Czech Joy films touched on that subject (Homies by Jan Foukal). “I was expecting that maybe we will have more of these fragile, vulnerable films shot in one room, and there was actually just one,” agrees Tabakov. “And ironically it is a very funny film. I think it’s interesting [the low number of lockdown-inspired films], but on the other hand, I totally understand it, because I don’t think that people like to deal with these topics anymore. Society, I think, is very tired and very exhausted [of Covid].”
I point out to Tabakov how, to an outsider, the Czech Republic is considered one of the European epicentres for doc output. Why does she think this is? “There’s a very strong documentary department at the Film Academy and there is a very strong documentary festival here in Ji.hlava, which has been supporting, for 26 years, author films,” she answers, adding that there is a healthy and longstanding tradition of docmaking in the country, and that “the state cinematography fund [Czech Film Fund] has never been in such a good position as it is in the last couple of years.” The country is also home to the Institute of Documentary Film, a raft of doc training initiatives, as well as the online portal DAFilms.com.
“And also we have always had many, many cinemas, so we have, we have a strong cinema culture,” she adds, although she concedes that audience retention is “very complicated right now, as it is in the rest of the world, after Covid.”
Tabakov further points to Czech docmakers whose works were selected for Czech Joy competition in 2022 (but not part of the Spotlight presentation), such as Jana Ševčíková who was awarded Ji.hlava’s Contribution to World Cinema Award in 2021. This year Ševčíková presented the Czech premiere of Those Who Dance in the Dark, about blind people seeking to enjoy life just as much as sighted people (if not more so). Doc Alliance’s Tabakov also cites Miroslav Janek whose All Ends Well, about the life of bees, was presented for the first time to Czech audiences.
“The director of the Fund is doing a great job for audiovisual,” Tabakov returns to the subject of central funding. “Of course, there are sometimes problems with which kind of projects are supported…but that’s a democratic dialogue that we can open, but I think that this way we will see how the financing will be in the next two years.” But Tabakov remains a realist, noting how funding levels are prone to fluctuation, and therefore as likely to go down as up. “Culture is always the first thing that gets cut,” she advises.
