Year of the Devil

Colour, 35mm
Czech Republic, 2002, 88 min
Section: Official Selection - Competition

Synopsis

Following on the precedent he set in the award-winning Padlock 1982-2007 (1993) and Mňága – Happy End (1996), director Petr Zelenka found inspiration for this highly original “mystification” at a concert headlined by singer-songwriter Jaromír Nohavica and the band Čechomor. The filmmaker, one of the most popular Czech directors, set this story in several unusual places: at an alcohol recovery centre and a strip mine, though primarily at concerts and backstage. There, the friendship between Nohavica and fellow-songwriter Karel Plíhal, and their encounter with Čechomor, are laid bare. Two foreigners play an important role in this story of friendship, miracles, and angelic and devilish temptation – a fictional Dutch documentarist, Jan Holman, and Sydney Opera conductor and former lead singer of the British band Killing Joke, Jaz Coleman. These two figures open up the film’s bizarre though friendly space to the world “from without,” and place it in (perhaps no less) bizarre contexts.

About the director

Petr Zelenka (b. 1967, Prague) graduated in script editing and screenwriting from Prague’s Film Academy (FAMU) in 1991, then took a job at Barrandov Studios as a script editor. After a number of successful documentaries and television projects, he shot the fictional feature-length television documentary Padlock 1982-2007 (1993), and followed it up with the stylistically similar “mystification” Mňága – Happy End (1996). His dramatic debut, Buttoners (1997), won a Czech Lion for Best Film and a 1998 Rotterdam Tiger. Director David Ondříček’s Loners, with a story and script co-written by Zelenka, became the most commercially successful Czech film of 2000. He wrote and directed the theatre play Tales of Ordinary Madness, which appeared last year in Prague.