Archive of films Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street / Vlk z Královských Vinohrad

Czech Republic / Slovak Republic / France
2016, 68 min

Section: Official Selection - Competition
Year: 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 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.

Contacts

Artcam Films
Rašínovo nábřeží 6, 128 00, Praha 2
Czech Republic
Tel: +420 221 411 619
Fax: +420 221 411 699
E-mail: [email protected]
www: www.artcam.cz

MasterFilm
Šumavská 13, 120 00, Prague 2
Czech Republic
Tel: +420 602 630 466
E-mail: [email protected]
www: www.masterfilm.cz

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About the film

Color, DCP
World premiere

Section:	Official Selection - Competition

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