Please feel invited for the retrospective of Helena Třeštíková, this year’s laureate of the Dragon of the Dragons Award.
Helena Třeštíková, a film-maker of more than 50 documentaries and the laureate of an impressive list of international film festivals, will receive this year’s Dragon of the Dragons award at the 52nd Krakow Film Festival, which will take place between 28 May and 3 June. The festival’s organizers prepared a retrospective of her films.
Everyone loves Czech cinema. It’s the highest time to watch a brilliant Czech documentary. The retrospective of films by Helena Třeštíková, who will receive this year’s Dragon of the Dragons award in Krakow, is a great opportunity to do so.
On 30 May at the award ceremony we will see one of her most famous movies, “René”. The film is a documentary return to a character from her series “Tell Me Something about Yourself, René”, which presents a story of a teenager from a broken family, later a criminal and a prisoner at the age of 15. After years, René is even more gloomy and disturbing. Despite his extraordinary intelligence, he prefers life in prison. The background to his story are constant changes of the political situation in the Czech Republic, but René is still unable to banish feelings of being rejected and he persistently rejects other people. “René”, a film distributed internationally, records as many as 20 years of his life, and the main character René Plášil caught media attention thanks to this documentary.
The movie has been honoured at many international film festivals receiving the European Film Academy Award for the best documentary of 2008, and the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig among many other awards.
During the retrospective, we will watch 12 movies, among them a documentary debut of Třeštíková, made during her studies at the FAMU Prague Film School. “The Miracle” captures first moments and months of life of her friend’s son. Třeštíková’s first contact with a camera caused feeling of insufficiency, which brought about an overwhelming desire to accompany Honza with a camera until his majority, and return to her future subjects in order to follow their next steps.
That was the case of the series about marriage, made for Czechoslovakian television and broadcasted with great success. During the retrospective, the final sixth episode will be screened. The main characters are Ivana and Vašek, the most go-ahead couple of the series, who not only attained success in life, but also succeed in sport and career. After 20 years, the film-maker returns to the subjects in “Marriage Stories, 20 Years Later. Ivana & Vašek”. The married couple of two perfectionists live a prosperous life, accomplishing their successive goals. However, they can’t avoid troubles – psychological and parenting problems.
In 1996, Třeštíková started to make documentaries with women playing the main roles. This time, the main subject of her long-term observation is “Katka”, a woman struggling with drug addiction for 14 years. The film, awarded with the Golden Tape at the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival, was seen by more than 100 000 spectators in Czech Republic, which made it possible for the documentary to be constantly present in local cinemas. Another movie screened at the 52nd Krakow Film Festival, “Marcela”, awarded in 2007 at the European Film Festival in Sevilla, was an earlier example of this trend.
Moreover, the programme consists of „A Touch of Light”, a moving short documentary about blind children, and “Lída Baarova’s Sweet Bitters”, story about a pre-war movie star, the beloved of Joseph Goebbels. The programme will be completed with “The Sweet Century”, told by seven women, who went through many political and social changes in the past century, and two short documentaries: “Two Anniversaries of Jan Zrzavy” and “The Life of Karl Čáslavski, a Film Historian”.