Skritek

Colour, 35 mm
Czech Republic, 2005, 87 min
Section: Czech Films 2005-2006

Synopsis

An ordinary rural family tries to fulfil its dream of the urban good life. Unfortunately, the father, who has a job as a butcher in a meat plant, succumbs to the charms of a colleague, while the mother, a cashier in a supermarket, has no intention of tolerating his infidelity. The son is a vegetarian butcher’s apprentice with adolescent problems, and the daughter has nothing but difficulties at school as well. And all this is complicated by a magical character, an elf ("skritek") who has crept out of the wood and turns every serious situation into absurdity. The film is both a sad grotesque, in which the protagonists have to face the snares of the city, but also a rich slapstick cascade of gags, sketches and tragi-comic situations. The only film of its kind in current Czech production, it respects the rules of the slapstick genre, using speeded up film, replacing dialogue with exclamations, putting the emphasis on sound effects and, above all, special effects and animation.

About the director

Tomáš Vorel (b. 1957, Prague) started out as an amateur and then studied drama directing at Prague’s Film Academy (FAMU), where his student films were already attracting attention, winning awards at student festivals and broadcast on Czech Television after 1989. After graduating, he made his feature film debut with the experimental film The Prague Five (Pražská pětka, 1988), in which he presented five Prague theatre groups. He followed this up with the stylised “rhythmical” Smoke (Kouř, 1990). In 1996 he founded the production company Vorel Film in order to make Stone Bridge (Kamenný most). He then made the comedy Out of the City (the bitter-sweet comedy Cesta z města, 2000); the slapstick comedy Skřítek (2005) is his most recent film. He is a co-founder and actor of the Prague Sklep (Cellar) theatre company and the avantgarde mime theatre Mimóza. He is also a TV director, and writes screenplays and books.