Duration (in minutes): 68 minutes
Country(ies) of filming: Armenia
Country of production: Czech Republic
Year of Production: 2008
Directors: Jana Ševčíková
Time of Showing: Friday 9th of June 2023, 11:15-13:00
Watch trailer

Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Arna Novaka 1, Room C34

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Jana Ševčíková and Galina Šustová

In 1988, an earthquake killed at least 25.000 people in the Armenian city of Gyumri, a third of them children. Jana Ševčíková explores life after and with the disaster, meets survivors and their children. The latter, born after the incident, are often regarded by their parents as reincarnations of their dead siblings. Ševčíková, however, does not see them as proof of some primitive faith in reincarnation, nor does she ever fall prey to esoteric exaggeration. She takes her protagonists very seriously, showing how differently they cope with the double burden of their own and those strangers’ unlived lives. Although the dead are not just addressed directly in short messages, but are also present in all statements and images, Ševčíková manages first and foremost to endow the living with individuality. Again and again we see them dance, self-absorbed and free of the burden of responsibility for a few moments. By means of sparsely used archive material, a meticulously executed soundtrack, bizarre images of life among the ruins and very intense encounters, the film creates an almost unreal atmosphere somewhere between bottomless grief and the banality of daily life which simply goes on – even in a city where memory is part of everyone’s daily business, which got stuck between life and death 20 years ago.

About the filmaker

With films that reflect on life in contemporary Eastern Europe, Czech filmmaker Jana Ševčíková has distinguished herself as a practitioner of poetic documentary. A graduate of the Prague Film Academy, her thesis film, Piemule (1984), offers a frank examination of Czech émigrés in Romania during the final years of Ceausecu‘s totaltitarian regime. She has produced films independently, such as Jakub (1992), and received state funding from the Czech Ministry of Culture. Her films have been shown at festivals in Berlin, Strasbourg, Karlovy Vary and Cracow. Praised throughout Europe, Ševčíková‘s intimately crafted works challenge the distanced conventions of ethnographic filmmaking.