No Regrets

Colour, 35 mm
Czech Republic, 2003, 83 min
Section: Documentary Competition

Synopsis

This feature debut by scriptwriter and director Theodora Remundová is made up of two independent stories oscillating between documentary and fiction. The first, Standard, began life as the author’s graduation film at FAMU and describes the painful relationships between three women bound by close family ties – the seventy-five-year-old mother Irena, her widowed fifty-year-old daughter Masha and her twenty-seven-year-old granddaughter Patricia. The protagonists are very open about their long-standing pain, humiliation, tribulations and anxiety which the years of cohabitation have turned into a labyrinth of bitterness. The protagonist of the second half, No Regrets, is seventy-one-year-old Danuše Pánková, who experienced not only happiness and success in her life, but whose relationship to life and the people around her is in sharp contrast to the suffocating relationships in the preceding family. Marriage, motherhood, family life – these intimate and very concrete themes become the starting point for thoughts about the meaning of human existence.
 

About the director

Theodora Remundová (b. 1974, Prague) drew attention to herself whilst studying documentary film in Karel Vachek’s studio at the Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague with the short films Stations on the Road beyond the Little Clouds (Zastavení na cestě za obláčky, 1994), Just a Little Bit of Luck (Jen malý kousek štěstí, 1994) and Brothers (Bratři, 1996). She established herself as an actress at Na Zábradlí Theatre (Ivanov, Cats’ Play, Wesele) and Rubín Theatre, where she was directed by Alice Nellis in Tennessee Williams’ Two Character’s Play. Alice Nellis also cast her in her own tragicomedy Eeny Meeny (1999), which, after acting in Jan Hřebejek’s tale for television Window (Okno) and a segment of the film Prague Stories (Praha očima..., 1999) became her feature film acting debut. She performed in Drahomíra Vihanová’s  Pilgrimage of Students Peter and Jacob (Zpráva o putování studentů Petra a Jakuba, 2000). In Alice Nellis’s Some Secrets (Výlet, 2002) she appeared alongside her actress mother Iva Janžurová and actress sister Sabina.