T.M.A.

Colour, 35 mm
Czech Republic, 2008, 95 min
WP – World premiere
Section: Official Selection - Out of Competition

Synopsis

Marek, a rock musician and artist, returns after many years to the old country home where he spent his childhood. He paints pictures to help him forget the wild lifestyle he had adopted up until now. Instead, however, he is bombarded with memories of bizarre events which he has completely shut out of his mind, involving not only his parents’ tragic death, but also his sister, with whom Marek grew up and who is now in a psychiatric hospital. The lonely hero begins to surrender to the force of this mysterious place and gradually uncovers the background to the macabre tragedies which occurred in the house all those years ago… Legend of Czech film Juraj Herz re-opens the psychological horror genre in the spirit of his legendary film The Cremator (1968). Similarly, T.M.A. isn’t merely a genre narrative full of oppressive suspense: the story, set in the present but profoundly tainted by the past, has serious implications and associations. "At Himmler’s behest, the Nazis murdered children and adults who had Down’s syndrome or some other psychological disorder,” says the director. "And that’s what I wanted to get into the film.”

About the director

Juraj Herz (b. 1934, Kežmarok, Czechoslovakia) was deported with his parents to a concentration camp towards the end of the 2nd World War. After the war he studied photography in Bratislava, and then direction and acting at DAMU’s puppet-theatre faculty. He debuted with the medium-length film Junk Shop, 1965, based on a story by Bohumil Hrabal. In subsequent years he became one of the most innovative filmmakers (The Sign of Cancer, 1966; The Limping Devil, 1968; The Cremator, 1968). He was still able to make his mark producing original genre works during the Normalisation period (Oil Lamps, 1971; Morgiana, 1972; the fairy tales Beauty and the Beast and The Ninth Heart, 1979). He emigrated to Germany in 1987 where he focused on TV documentaries, serials and fairy tales. He has been filming both in the CR and abroad since the beginning of the 1990s (e.g. the drama Passage, 1997). He has received a number of domestic and international awards for his work.