Jan Foukal

he story of an unusual journey or a staged piece of contemplation? However we perceive this tale of a couple wandering through the Czech countryside, we can best experience it by yielding to the calm tempo of their journey through the shady woods.

The film's main theme is obsession. An obsession with love, with art, originality, copying, with success, money and... with oneself. Sooner or later, if we lose our rational upper hand over it and let ourselves be dragged down by it, every obsession leads to destruction. But it is only when being dragged down, in spite of all the cuts and bruises, that we find a unique DELIGHT, if only for a few short moments - and what else is life really about? It is like a drug. What at first seems to be weak and trivial is capable of expanding and growing into a serious problem that can appear to be absolutely incomprehensible and absurd to those who have never experienced anything like it.

František Fajtl and Filip Jánský were among the few Czechoslovak airmen who actively fought on all major European battlefronts during World War II and lived to tell the tale. This unique documentary edit, which combines authentic eyewitness accounts of historic events with little-known archival footage, examines various fates and places as well as the journeys associated with them. The resulting amalgam of images, speeches, and music/sound files is far from your typical historical illustration. A suggestive portrayal of life under bleak conditions, far away from home and on the cusp of death, unfolds before our very eyes.

Two new flatmates are not even looking for an exit from the lockdown - which becomes more of a backdrop outside the windows of a one-bedroom Prague apartment. Shot on an ever present handheld camera, the reality of the (non)passing time of the pandemic slowly reveals itself. As the protagonists mutually confess and unmask each other over past unfulfilled relationships, we witness how they naturally complement one another in the household. The look inward, at ordinary events, gradually transforms the apartment into an autonomous world of imagination and song. The film thus serves as a manifesto of creation as an escape from an otherwise closed-up world. With giddy exaggeration, the emerging friendship opens up more general questions of the human need for social interaction and sharing life.