Girlie

Colour, 35 mm
Czech Republic, 2002, 83 min
Section: Czech Films
Oficiální stránky: www.devcatko.cz

Synopsis

Seventeen-year-old Slovak girl Ema lives with her mother on one of the Prague prefab housing estates. She is willing to do a great deal in order to find love for herself and her abandoned, aging mother – she naively throws herself into erotic relationships and thus finds herself hopping between flats, beds and dreams. She splits up with her lover Viktor; she encounters misunderstanding from her friend Marie, a single mother; she experiences a brief romance with future pilot Karel, whose parents are trying to reawaken the emotional spark after years of married life; she makes the acquaintance of a mysterious taxi-driver with no taxi, who drives drunk people home in their own cars. The lives of the characters in this tragicomic story intertwine on various time planes, in dream-like situations and harsh reality. Girlie is also the first Czech film to be made with a digital HDTV video camera, which enables high resolution. This feature debut by scriptwriter and director Benjamin Tuček is especially absorbing for the acting performances, in particular the female roles – Jana Hubinská as Ema’s mother won a Czech Lion in 2002 for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

About the director

Benjamin Tuček (b. 1972) studied at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, then at FAMU (screenwriting and dramaturgy, 2000). For his student script Feet First he was awarded the Maxim and Literary Fund Prizes at the FAMU film festival in 1997. He worked as assistant director and casting director on Saša Gedeon’s film Return of the Idiot. He writes screenplays, directs documentary and short films (collaboration on the TV documentary mystifications Kynetic Encyclopaedia of the Universe) and he works as a special assistant at FAMU. He played a minor role in last year’s KV IFF winner, Petr Zelenka’s Year of the Devil. Girlie is Tuček’s feature debut, which he wrote and directed in a coproduction with Czech Television. He is currently working with Marek Najbrt and Robert Geisler on the script for the film The Masters.