Late Night Talks With Mother

Colour, 35 mm
Czech Republic, 2002, 69 min
Section: Czech Films

Synopsis

An artistically experimental feature film with heavily autobiographical elements from the enfant terrible of Czech cinema, Jan Němec. The director carries out a cinematic-psychoanalytic probe into his own fate. In this cleverly stylised movie (a seeming counterpart to Kafka’s Letter to His Father) the protagonist entreats his dead mother to grant him absolution. Her profession as an ophthalmologist serves as one of the key formal motifs in a cinematic confession whose central “axis” is the Prague tramline running from the equestrian statue at the top of Wenceslas Square to the crematorium in Strašnice. Though the filmmaker’s forced exile temporarily removed him from places where he lived and where the most important people in his life appeared, the tramline became a metaphoric path: half intimately painful, half showy reconciliation with his own tempestuous life. Originally shot on video, the film took the Golden Leopard for video at the 2001 Locarno IFF.

About the director

Jan Němec (b. 1936, Prague) had already achieved success at FAMU  by the time he made his feature debut Diamonds of the Night (1964 – Grand Prix at the Mannheim IFF), today considered one of the top works of the Czech new wave. He then contributed a segment to Pearls of the Deep (1965), following it up with Martyrs of Love (1966) and The Party and the Guests (1966 –Grand Prize at the Bergamo IFF). The short Mother and Son brought him the Grand Prize at Oberhausen, while Oratorio for Prague, a documentary focusing on the 1968 Soviet invasion, won the FIPRESCI Prize at Mannheim. In 1974 he was exiled by not being allowed to return home. While abroad he shot noteworthy films including an adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1975), Peace in our Time? (1988, TV) and The Poet Remembers (1989, TV). In 1990 he directed the provocative comedy The Flames of Royal Love, and six years later he added Code Name: Ruby to his filmography.