René

Colour, 35 mm
Czech Republic, 2008, 90 min
WP – World premiere
Section: Documentary Films in Competition

Synopsis

“Why has my shitty life turned out like this? No-one knows. Not even God. God’s on holiday and he’s reading porn” – an excerpt from Diary of the Forgotten, the journal kept by die-hard criminal and imaginative writer René Plášil, the main protagonist in another of Helena Třeštíková’s long-term documentaries. With raw authenticity, the director records the luckless fate of René over a period of twenty years as he yo-yos between prison and freedom. The life of René, who successfully stylises himself in the role of a desperado, unfolds against a backdrop of important political events occurring in the CR and beyond its borders. The Velvet Revolution, the presidential election, 9/11 and the Czech Republic’s accession to the EU. All this is “digested” by René mostly from the confines of various prisons. The film also traces the director’s intriguing relationship with her “subject of study”, who sometimes feels like a prostitute selling his life story for filthy lucre, but for whom the visits from the film crew or his countless letters to Helena Třeštíková are often his only solace.

About the director

Helena Třeštíková (b. 1949, Prague) studied direction at FAMU (1974) and established the Film and Sociology Foundation at the end of 1990, and the Man and Time Foundation in 1994. She started making documentaries spanning several years back in 1972, her first being the college film Viva Acqua (1972). She has made over 40 documentaries, mostly treating human relationships, social problems and women’s issues. Select filmography: A Touch of Light (1979), If Something Needs Our Help – It’s Freedom (1990), Lída Baarová’s Bittersweet Memories (1996), Expulsion from Literature (1999), Sweet Century (1998 – Best Documentary at the KVIFF) or the similarly conceived Women at the Turn of the Millennium (Trapped, 2001 – Special Jury Mention at the KVIFF). Long-term series: Tell Me Something about Yourself (from 1989) and Marriage Stories (1987-2006). The KVIFF screened her long-term documentary Marcela (2006) in 2007.