Film Archive

The Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street

Official Selection - Competition 2016 / Vlk z Královských Vinohrad / Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, France 2016

“Our life zips by faster than our recollections of it,” stated Jan Němec (1936–2016), internationally celebrated Czech director. A true original, the hard-headed and hard-nosed rebel adapted his own quasi-autobiographical short stories into his final film to give us a dejected comedy, an unsentimental reminiscence, and a nonchalant settling of scores in punk regalia. Both the movie and its maker defy categorisation.

Synopsis

“Our life zips by faster than our recollections of it,” stated internationally celebrated Czech director Jan Němec (1936-2016). One of the country’s few home-grown filmmakers, here he loosely adapted his final film from his own collection of quasi-autobiographical tales. The result is a dejected comedy, an unsentimental reminiscence of a life story spanning the Sixties to the present, and a nonchalant settling of scores in punk regalia. We join the director’s alter ego John Jan at Cannes during the festival’s controversial 1968 edition and, not long after, we find ourselves in the Czech capital that same summer, now a city besieged by Soviet tanks. Exile, the return to Prague, the burial of communism, freedom. As Němec noted himself, “the film has ‘wolf’ in its title, a feral, cunning, uncontrollable creature. A wolf in sheep’s clothing and vice versa. You’ll see where it all happened, you’ll get the authentic dialogues, the original commentaries, genuine archive footage, and fake stuff as well. Everything in the film really did happen, and John Jan really experienced it. Although, it has to be said, he occasionally inflated things a little.”

Karel Och

About the film

68 min / Color, DCP
World premiere
Director Jan Němec / Screenplay Jan Němec / Dir. of Photography Jiří Maxa / Music Dominik Dolejší, Eric Clapton, J. S. Bach / Editor Josef Krajbich / Art Director Tereza Kučerová, Aneta Grňáková / Producer Tomáš Michálek (na filmu spolupracovali / collaborators: Tomáš Klein, Jakub Felcman) / Production MasterFilm, s.r.o. / Coproduction Czech Television, UPP, Media Film, Bocalupo Films / Cast Jiří Mádl, Karel Roden, Martin Pechlát, Tomáš Klein, Gabriela Míčová, Jiří Menzel, Jiří Bartoška, Markéta Janoušková, Robin Kvapil, Táňa Pauhofová, Ted Otis / Contact MasterFilm / Distributor Artcam Films

About the director

Jan Němec (1936–2016, Prague), Czech director, producer and teacher at FAMU. One of the leading figures of the Czechoslovak New Wave, he gave his debut with Diamonds of the Night (1964); in the same decade he created another of his masterpieces, The Party and the Guests (1966), which had the British magazine Films and Filming hailing him as one of the year’s top five directors. He was definitively banned from making films after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which became the subject of his internationally acclaimed documentary Oratorio for Prague (1968). From 1974 to 1989 he lived and worked in exile and, after his return home, he shot the majority of his films via his own company, Jan Němec – Film, established together with Iva Ruszeláková, whom he later married.