Victims and Murderers

Colour, 35mm
Czech Republic, France, Switzerland, 2000, 98 min
Section: Czech Films

Synopsis

Brother and sister Mirek and Jana grew up together in the small town of Polička. The murder of their much-hated father, staged as an accident, only serves to intensify their already strong emotional bond. Over the years the older dominant sister gradually loses her influence over the brother, an influence which has allowed her to easily destroy all his attempts at finding a love relationship. Jana, who sought an escape from feelings of guilt and the small-town boredom of her life in wild excursions to Prague, finally gets married to a doctor named Josef; the careworn Mirek in turn looks for a way out with a lonely waitress named Olga. But not even after this do the siblings, bound together by their tormenting incestuous love, stop torturing each other and the end is tragedy. The story, told with Hitchcockian generic overtones, takes place on two time planes – the seventies, when the protagonists go through their stormy adolescent years, and the nineties, when their long-twisted characters push them one last time into fateful conflict. The music of Bohuslav Martinů, who himself grew up in Polička, forms a timeless contrast to the protagonists’ dramatic story.

About the director

Andrea Sedláčková (b. 1967, Prague) studied screenwriting at Prague’s Film Academy (FAMU) in 1986-1989 and then emigrated to France where she studied editing and direction at FEMIS in Paris between 1990 and 1993. In France, where she lives most of the time, she works as an editor (she has worked with Jacques Maillot and Michel Deville, among others). She has also shot films and documentaries for Czech Television. Films: People Who Judge Us (1996), Parliament Dances (1997), Fast Starts (1998) and the made-for-TV film From the Life of a Pubescent Girl (1999). She is also credited with writing the script for her feature film debut Victims and Murderers (2000), a psychological drama about a brother and sister’s torturous relationship.