The Beauty Exchange

Colour, BETA
Czech Republic, 2004, 77 min
Section: Czech Films 2004-2005
Oficiální stránky: www.zenypromeny.cz

Synopsis

This investigative documentary looks into what Czech consumer society
thinks about the ideal of female beauty. The standard, moulded by the mass media – commercials television, the cosmetics industry and glamour magazines – is a cruelly abstract goal.. The film focuses on several women who are vainly trying to attain it: worker Eva seeks to improve her bustline with plastic surgery, student Karolína is obsessed by cosmetics, accountant Magda is trapped by dieting, and high school student Zuzana becomes the victim of a modelling contest. Director Erika Hníková confronts these specific human lives with merciless statistics and the freethinking opinions of young feminists. She also interviews employees of Cosmopolitan magazine, who mindlessly participate in shaping the conception of female beauty. This provocative movie was made over a period of one year, and the filmmaker plays an important role, functioning as a relentlessly inquisitive interrogator who manages to touch her protagonists surprisingly close to the bone.

About the director

Erika Hníková (b. 1976,Prague) studied film science for three years at Charles University. She then transferred to the department of documentary filmmaking at Prague ’s Film Academy, graduating with The Beauty Exchange (2004); later, she adapted the documentary for screening in theatres and on DVD. Filmography: the shorts Repatriates from Osek (1999) and Four Steps Bi-Half (2000), the medium-length work Our Class (2001), the short Modelling Life (2003), the feature-length doc The Beauty Exchange (2004) and a medium-length documentary on the Czech Republic’s entry into the European Union,E Day (2004, co-dir. Vít Janeček, Ivana Miloševičová).