Prophets and Poets. Chapters from the Calendar

Black and white, Other
Czech Republic, 2000, 58 min
Section: Czech Films

Synopsis

A documentary featuring testimonies of the world by randomly selected people: the fruit-grower Čečil, the Dvorský family who are building a log cabin in the woods, a mentally handicapped street-sweeper named František and his wife Iva, and the transvestite Petr-Sue Ellen. Such folk are intended to represent the common people who in Bohumil Hrabal’s phrase extract symbolic “pearls on the bottom” from the everyday commonness of their lives. The coming end of the millennium is reflected upon by intellectuals too – poets Ivo Vodseďálek and Yveta Shanfeldová, feminist Mirek Vodrážka and his “Indian” wife Iva, and philosophers Ladislav Šerý and Václav Bělohradský. Even the filmmaker himself steps in front of the camera, acting as a narrator manipulating a resistant reality. This kaleidoscopic image of the end of the millennium is brought “under the influence of the moment and of events” as if it were the filmmaker’s subjective statement about the ways people mould and remake their environments and themselves.

About the director

Ivan Vojnár (b. 1942, Žilina) studied cinematography at Prague’s Film Academy (FAMU) from 1960 to 1965. Beginning in 1967 he worked as a cameraman for a number of top Czech and Slovak documentary filmmakers. Since then he has added a number of other documentaries to his credits as filmmaker: Fear (1989, Strach), Lanscape with Fire (1992, Krajina s ohněm), a portrait of cameraman Miroslav Ondříček (1993, GEN - Miroslav Ondříček), Insomnia (1993, Nespavost), Actors (1996, Herci). His documentary essay focusing on psychiatric patients, In the Garden (V zahradě), was awarded Main Prize at the Karlovy Vary IFF in 1995. His feature film debut came in 1997 with the stylised black-and-white parable The Way through the Bleak Woods (Cesta pustým lesem).