Maroš Berák

In Fragile Identity, Slovak director Zuzana Piussi examines her fellow countrymen’s current notions of nationality. She expresses her concern that Slovak national sentiment is rather fragile and liable to political misuse. The protagonists often reject the leading Czech figures of Czechoslovak history and prefer to look for their roots in the common “pre-national“ past of Great Moravia. Although many of the stories are rather tragicomic, the turbulent developments in the EU have shown that the search for one’s own identity is a sensitive matter not only in Slovakia.

A documentary-scenic film analyzing bullying in institutions and businesses in a interconnected sequence of stories that are compiled into a whole. A large STEM / MARK research from 2013 states that bullying affects 23 percent of employees. Surprisingly, a large percentage of registered cases concerns people working in the public sector or in the state administration, while the reasons for bullying at the workplace differ. In our film we focus on people who went through a long-term traumatic experience of bullying.

The film follows one of the most prominent prisoners of the Military regime in Burma returning to his homeland after 20 years. Presenting journey to the people on both sides of for years divided society gives a different perspective of the possibilities of coexistence, forgiveness and looking at your own life and society. Banyarr wants to know before the 2020 election, whether it's possible to live back in the country. The same simple question is asked by hundreds of millions people, who have fled their countries suffering from harsh regimes or even wars. He wants to know, whether democratic and open development of society is possible, despite of rising contradictions on many levels.