East Silver Caravan included three new films in its selection to be supported by festival service. The documentaries from Central and Eastern Europe have thus been accompanied by the controversial, response challenging film The World According to Daliborek, student film Jágr Republic and existential documentary Tarzan’s Testicles.
Vít Klusák’s latest film, The World According to Daliborek has been written about a lot in both Czech and international media so there is little need to introduce it at length. However, it deserves attention at festivals as well, and it is sure to re-kindle the necessary discussion not only on the racism and neo-Nazism topics but even the documentary genre per se.
The Jágr Republic, a short film by Ondřej Šálek, a student of the Documentary Film Department at FAMU, handles the personality cult of Jaromír Jágr in the Czech Republic. A number of people have included him in their private lives, and try to get closer to him both mentally and physically. Are these just signs of popularity of ice-hockey, or is this situation saying more about the Czech society than we are willing to admit? The festival service for this film will be provided by IDF thanks to the East Silver Caravan project in cooperation with Studio FAMU. It is in the context of IDF’s other activities promoting young, prospective filmmakers. Many interesting, good quality films are made during the university years; these films also deserve our attention.
The last film in the threesome is a Romanian-French coproduction, Tarzan’s Testicles. The director, Alexandru Solomon applies the optics of an ex-Soviet research centre which aimed at creating an ape-human hybrid to observe the present social situation in Abkhazia today. Although the human ape research fell apart just like the Soviet Union, people continue to live together with big apes behind the walls of the institute.
The East Silver Caravan project gets documentaries from Central and Eastern Europe to international festivals every month. The latest arrival will be the Pulse screening within the Apricot Tree International Documentary Film Festival, held on October 1 – 5, 2017 in Armenia.
