Film writer and researcher Botagoz Koilybayeva attended Czech Docs: Coming Soon... to explore five exciting Czech documentary projects in development. Read her full article to discover more, including an interview with director Juliana Moska.

On 17 March, the French Institute in Prague hosted the panel “Czech Docs: Coming Soon…”, showcasing five compelling Czech projects currently at different stages of development. The panel, moderated by the Programme Director at the Institute of Documentary Film Zdeněk Blaha, featured the newcomers and seasoned filmmakers whose films range from an intimate portrait of an ornithologist and a humorous quest for immortality to an anthropological study of redheads and an ecological investigation of wastelands in Slovakia. 

For DOKweb, I visited the session and spoke with director Juliana Moska about her debut documentary feature, How Long Until We Die Out?

Exploring Environmental and Human Narratives

The first presentation, Wasteland Chronicles, is a Czech-Slovak co-production directed by a collective of three female filmmakers: Viera Čákanyová, Barbora Sliepková, and Lucia Kašová. Described in the press notes as a “three-act dystopian documentary about the state of the environment in Slovakia,” the film delves into different ecological crises, with each director focusing on a specific environmental burden. 

Producer Anna Mach Rumanová and director Viera Čákanyová explained that the first part of the film examines a toxic legacy of a former chemical factory in eastern Slovakia, which operated during the country’s socialist period. PCP,  an extremely dangerous chemical, has remained in the soil and water, posing a tangible threat in the present day. Wasteland Chronicles employs a mix of observational documentary techniques and animation, allowing viewers to visually explore the contaminated land—right down to its underground mycelial networks. This ambitious project also probes more philosophical questions about geological time, the genius loci of place, and how non-human nature plays a role in collective healing.

Similarly, Květa Chaloupková’s debut feature Who Is Missing Today? inquires about the interconnectedness of humans and animals, particularly birds. Following renowned Czech ornithologist Lubomír Peške, the director questions the human and non-human costs of ecological grief. Produced by Jitka Kotrlová of Frame Films, the documentary incorporates archival footage of Peške’s sojourn in the Syrian desert, where the ornithologist documented the last wild ibis. The story, however, remains rooted in the Czech Republic, shifting focus to Peške’s relationships with the birds nesting in his own backyard. The documentary promises to deliver a balanced view, highlighting the importance of the commonplace and the exotic. 

The exploration of nature continues with Czech director Nikola Klinger’s Land of Fire, an ethnographic documentary set in the remote regions of British Columbia. The film provides an unfiltered look at contemporary life within First Nations communities, touching on themes of violence, loss, and resilience.

“Everybody has a direct experience with violence, knowing somebody who died in a fight or went missing,” reads a key screen caption.Through this lens, the director follows families who have lost their loved ones. The posters of the missing stand lonely along the highways, giving a film a sombre atmosphere. During the Q&A, Klinger and his producer Kristina Husová were careful not to explicitly label their protagonists' ethnic identity, though the teaser makes it clear that the film focuses on Indigenous communities. Klinger acknowledged some initial skepticism from the local community, making it interesting to see how his outsider perspective will shape the final film.

In contrast, the last two documentaries took a more playful—though still thought-provoking—approach to the theme of mortality.

Identity, Loss, and the Search for Meaning

Latvian filmmaker Davis Simanis and his Czech producer Radim Procházka presented Death of Death, a documentary exploring the peculiar world of the immortality industry. Through eccentric characters, absurd pronouncements of eternal life, and pseudo-scientific beliefs, Simanis exposes the strange intersection of technology, philosophy, and human desire. While the teaser leaned into the absurd, Procházka hinted at the film’s more existential questions on life and death, a transhumanist plea of becoming a cyborg. Narrated by the director, the film promises a unique and humorous perspective to the dread that haunts us all. A condensed, TV-friendly version of the documentary is also in the pipeline.

Finally, Juliana Moska and her producers Klára Mamojková and Wanda Kaprálová of CLAW films introduced How Long Until They Die Out? The title refers to the myth that redheads will disappear within the next hundred years.The project aspires to be part personal exploration of Moska’s own redheadedness as the only redhead in her family, and part socio-anthropological portrait of a collective identity, if there is such a thing. These and other questions will be explored in the film. 

An Interview with Juliana Moska

What initially sparked the idea for this project?
I remember a moment when I was rummaging through old boxes in the attic and found my old diary. It was two years ago. In that diary, as I was flipping through it, I discovered a piece of paper that my mom had given me when I was 12 years old. It was just a printout from the internet, but it claimed that redheads would go extinct within 50 years.

Reading it again after so long, I couldn’t help but laugh. Since that moment I kept thinking and trying to understand how I might have felt as a young girl while reading the text. Apparently, as a child, I often complained to my mum about feeling different, about how people looked at me. I attracted too much attention, which I didn’t really want.

Your previous short films are more experimental, both formally and conceptually. What led you to take a different approach for your first feature?
The approach to creating a documentary film was mainly driven by a kind of curiosity, which I wanted to explore both in relation to myself and to others. Since my previous films were more experimental and never quite focused on people, I wanted to try a different approach for my final film at the Film Academy. I wanted to work more with people, with protagonists, something I have never done before, because I was so afraid of people. That said, the experimental films have given me a huge sense of creative freedom in terms of expression.

The synopsis mentions “a chimeric understanding and an effort to identify with one's community.” I am quite intrigued by the word “chimeric” in this context. Can you elaborate on it?
In this context, “chimeric” means something enticing, something a bit unreal, something that also refers back to your previous question. It also ties into some inner fear, an internal worry about belonging. It also refers to a path that I cannot predict, I can’t foresee. Can I really find a sense of community among people just because we share a physical trait? What does that actually mean to “identify with something or someone”?

The film explores two fundamental aspects of society - identity and stereotype. Without giving too much away, how do these themes come together in the film?
I think that identity and stereotypes cannot exist without each other in our society. If I am going to capture a minority group, I have to find a way to acknowledge the stereotypes surrounding it. I know that this will be a challenge, but I look forward to exploring it!

Botagoz Koilybayeva

​​​Botagoz Koilybayeva is a Kazakh-born, Prague-based PhD student, researcher and film writer. She is an alumna of the Berlinale Talent Press 2025. She writes about cinema in academic and cultural, as well as English-language and Central Asian contexts. Her writing in English can be found on Little White Lies, Klassiki and Cineropa. Her bylines in Russian include the art journal Art of Her, ’98mag and Qyzqaras. Her current PhD research centres on the intersection of film, ecology and the more-than-human. She has presented her research at conferences in Dresden and Utrecht.