Film Archive

Zero

East of the West - Competition 2015 / Zero / Hungary, Czech Republic, Germany 2015

We find ourselves in the very near future when bees are dying en masse and humanity has a mere four years left to live. An anarchist beekeeper sets out to wage a ruthlessly radical battle for survival. A formally inventive and wholly nonconforming vision of the fight against globalization.

Synopsis

Using as a starting point the famous remark “If bees disappeared off the face of the Earth, humankind would only have four years left to live,” director Gyula Nemes reflects in his film on the future of our ecosystem. His distinctive take on the fight against globalisation, on ecological utopias and inevitable natural disasters is conveyed via four different genres. He adopts a burlesque approach to introduce us to the former boss of an artificial honey factory turned passionate forest beekeeper. Then follows a melodramatic story of apian love: action sequences illustrate the advance of unconventional guerrilla warfare, whose termination sees mankind returning to candlelight and horse-drawn modes of transport. The African road movie which frames the entire film is conceived as the fata morgana of a devastated yet resolute human soul. The director’s genre collage and his experiments with black-and-white and colour material, comic-strip inserts and soundtrack make for an intellectually wholesome and immensely witty film.

Kamila Dolotina

About the film

83 min / Color, 35 mm
World premiere
Director Gyula Nemes / Screenplay Tamás Beregi, Gyula Nemes / Dir. of Photography Balázs Dobóczi / Music Albert Márkos, Kopir Rozsywal Bestar, Antonio Vivaldi, Dicko Boubacar, Dicko Issiaka / Editor Péter Politzer / Producer Gyula Nemes / Production Playtime / Coproduction endorfilm, l Kataput Film, 42Film / Cast Krisztián Kovács, Martina Krátká, Udo Kier / Sales HNFF World Sales

About the director

Gyula Nemes (b. 1974, Vác, Hungary) initially studied Czech and film science. He undertook postgraduate studies at FAMU under Věra Chytilová and Karel Vachek. The distinctive style of his mentors is clearly projected into the content and form of Nemes’ highly nonconformist work, his accomplished raw shots and his bizarre characters. His feature debut My One and Onlies (Egyetleneim, 2006) was presented as part of Settimana della critica at Venice, and his graduate film Lost World (Letűnt világ, 2008) won Best Short Documentary at Karlovy Vary. The Czech fest also screened The Dike of Transience (A malundóság gátja, 2004) in the short documentary competition. His experimentation with farce and the grotesque, the singular stylisation of his black-and-white and colour imagery and the absence of traditional dialogue are also characteristic of Zero (2015).