Empire Builders

The docu-fiction essay portrays self-taught but ambitious right-wing populists who long to play a high-stakes game and act as fictional characters, grey eminences or manly heroes. Through the character of a propagandist cinematographer and movie freak, the film follows the builders of a Czech local movement agitating against Islam and immigration in a country which refuses to accept refugees and where no refugees come. The cinematographer engages his friend in the movement: a sociologist who takes books about the clash of civilizations seriously. They both relate to living a great story in which big history meets small history, the dominating meets the dominated, sense meets absurdity, reality meets fiction, while everything is pervaded by ideology which both builds and destroys.