Synopsis
Playful and humorous tale of Prokop and Magdalena’s travels to see a solar eclipse.
A poetic meditation on transportation between places and communication between people. Primarily, however, it is a portrait of two real people, Prokop Holoubek and Magdalena Hrubá (close friends of director Petr Marek), and their environment: the city and nature. The director doesn’t capture their performances on film but rather their existence within the element of film. On their way to the eclipse they have many adventures and become wiser, and because Prokop is a bit of a scatterbrain they even find themselves in danger…
Genre
Czech Republic
Producers
PETR OUKROPEC
PETR MAREK
Genre
Comedy
Co-producers
WITH THE SUPPORT OF CZECH FILM FUND
Release Date
21. 11. 2002
Screening Formats
SD FILES
Runtime
98 min
Trailer & Photogallery
Cast & Crew
Writer, Director, Cinematography, Editor
PETR MAREK
CAST
MAGDALENA HRUBÁ, PROKOP HOLOUBEK, PETR MAREK, BOHDAN KARÁSEK, JANA PROVAZNÍKOVÁ A DALŠÍ
MUSIC
PETR MAREK, ONDŘEJ ŠÁREK, MAGDALENA HRUBÁ, PROKOP HOLOUBEK
About the film
The mood of the film comes from the poetics of a subtle strangeness that the UNARFILM creators used in their previous films. It is visible both in the overall mood of the film and in the unusual work with music (film music and sound are equal partakers – characters in the film), free dramaturgical structure, and choice of actors. The authors do not want to create a perfect illusion of cinematic reality. They do not strive for psychological credibility of the characters. They rather play with cinematic space and time, combining seemingly disparate elements. They want to create a kind of “music in images”. In such a film, nature, “insignificant” movements in the background or the wind in the hair of a supporting character play an equally important role as the main characters.
Images (often documentary images) enter the plot and develop the theme on an ideological level. Together with two narrators, they comment on the situations in the plot.
The central theme of the film’s conceptual plan is various forms of transport: from the mental transportation of information, through logical plots and dramatic movements of characters to the symbolic use of various means of transport and styles. The film tries to find adequacy for the ways of interpersonal communication and the functioning of society in those “traffic metaphors”. During working on the film, the authors’ thinking on the topic collided with one of Jan Keller’s essays, published in the book Eseje o nedávné minulosti a blízké budoucnosti (Essays on the Recent Past and the Near Future), in which he compares the socio-economic processes of contemporary Western civilization to the movement of a conveyor belt. The main characters of our film are either completely outside this movement or are only partially affected by it. Therefore, the central question is: What chance do “pure souls” have to survive in their own “traffic-free inner ghetto”? The overall tone of the film is “comedy-poetic.”