My Husband’s Women

Colour, 35 mm
Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, Hungary, 2009, 85 min
Section: Czech Films 2008-2009

About the film

Popular film actress Věra is getting on in years and is now faring better as a talk show host. These days it’s rare that she finds a common language with her husband Daniel, the boss of a production agency and chronic seducer of young girls. Not even the arrival of the young Macedonian Liana, who happens to find refuge in the successful media couple’s luxury flat, is able to breathe new life into the defunct relationship. Like Věra and Daniel, the nurse Eva and terminally ill designer Martin are also trying to find their place in life. The succession of habitual lies, games of hide-and-seek and manipulation becomes more serious with the murder of a girl Daniel recommended to Japanese clients for an advertising campaign for artificial sakura flowers. A victim of serious psychological problems, he’s not entirely sure what happened on that fateful night. The new film by experienced director Ivan Vojnár is a story about a fast-moving modern world from which spontaneity, humaneness and spiritual values are slowly ebbing away.

About the director

Ivan Vojnár (b. 1942, Žilina) is one of the Czech Republic’s most fascinating cinematographers and documentarists who has been drawing attention with his own feature films as well in recent years. He studied photography at Prague’s FAMU and established himself as a close colleague of a series of leading documentarists. In 1988 he made the portrait of mime artist Bolek Polívka Dream about Pierrot. Other documentaries include Fear (1989), Landscape with Fire (1992), Insomnia (1993) and Actors (1995). His essay on patients in a psychiatric hospital In the Garden won him Best Documentary at the KVIFF in 1995. In 1997 he gave his feature debut with the parable The Way through the Bleak Woods and he continued his quest for truth in a film bordering on feature and documentary, Forest Walkers (2003). He set a new trend in his documentary work with his medium-length reflection Prophets and Poets. Chapters from a Calendar (2000) and the film survey Reminiscences (2006).