Jakub Pinkava

India as a society in transition, between tradition and globalization. Cow as the sacred Mother. 300 billion mothers. A dirty business, smugglers buying old cows from poor peasants and transporting them over the border to Bangladesh, where the Mother is slaughtered. A transition between a society where man and cow are equal to another, where the cow is used as a tool for money. A social shift that is still going on, the new generation against the old. A new superpower dealing with its traditional beliefs.

Don’t Gaze Long Into The Abyss is a feature–length love-and-hate story of a beatnik fascination
into an exotic east and epic drama of an adventurous life and dream shattered by two political
events - Prague spring and Islamic revolution of 1978. It is filmmaker’s journey into a dark mind and in the steps of adventurous and wandering life of a Czech spoilt genius never made, never
released, never believed. Meditative film poem about freedom, mysticism, fate and exile. The
mysticism of a Czech artist seen through an "eastern" oriental eye.

Nazar works in Kiev, Ukraine, as a screenwriter. Together with his wife and small son, they live peacefully and nothing indicates that this is about to change. Towards the end of 2013, however, the Maidan square in central Kiev sees masses of protesters who oppose the decision of president Viktor Yanukovych who refused to sign the pending association agreement with the EU. Foreign journalists flock to Kyiv to report from the mass protests and Nazar is one of those who provide them with intel. He becomes a fixer – a translator and a guide for teams of journalists. Soon he realizes that he likes to work in extreme conditions. When, two months later, an open war breaks out in the East, he guides the journalists through the key events of the conflict. He sees the development first-hand and together with the journalists, he creates the testimony that then travels the globe. Soon, however, the war is forgotten. The web documentary The Forgotten war provides a testimony about a conflict that had raged in the Eastern Ukraine for almost four years now. As a guide, Nazar tries to give objective causes of the war, he leads the viewer through the Donbass area, hinting at the complicated local history and the pride of the local miners. Apart from the historic context, however, he shows the viewers the everyday reality of life in the so-called grey zone, the strip of land directly touching the frontlines. The documentary permits us to view the military conflict from the perspective of the locals and witness the everyday situations experienced by the locals in the unstable region. Through Nazar, the viewer gets a chance to learn about the everyday lives of four different people – a small school girl, a humanitarian aid worker, a female doctor and a senior citizen. In the state of war, their everyday rituals often become absurd.

The film starts with Alfred Wetzler on his way to Frankfurt in 1964 to give a testimony at the Auschwitz Prozess, the biggest German trial of Nazi war criminals. His aim is to help convict ex-SS guards Wilhelm Boger and Oswald Kaduk of mass murder. He is a valuable witness due to the fact that he is one of the authors of the Auschwitz Protocol, a historical 40-page document that broke the story of the Nazi extermination machinery to the world. After introducing Wetzler's story we go back in time to 1944 to describe the escape and what motivated it. Wetzler was a member of the camp resistance and when its leadership found out that soon a million Hungarian Jews were to be deported, they decided someone should escape the camp to warn the Allies and get them to bomb the camp. Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba were chosen as the best candidates to complete what was seen as a suicide mission. Yet, against all odds they succeeded and endured unimaginable hardships on their way to Slovakia. Afterwards they wrote the report which received worldwide attention, but was labelled a hoax by the Nazis and even on the Allied side was considered a gross “Jewish” exaggeration. This meant the camp was never bombed, a fact that haunted Vrba and Wetzler for the rest of their lives. We then examine the post-war period of Wetzler's life. In 1950 he is implicated in an antisemitic trial and narrowly avoids another imprisonment. Afterwards he is considered an enemy of the state and faces persecution. In the 1960s his situation improves, he writes his groundbreaking Auschwitz memoir, and fights for justice for the victims. This is when we return to Wetzler's testimony at the trial, which is hugely traumatic especially as many of the criminals escape punishment. In the 1970s and 80s Wetzler is once again persecuted and under surveillance of the secret service. All mentions of him are suppressed, and he withdraws from society out of fear for his family. In 1988 he dies in obscurity in Bratislava.

Třeboň, Occupied Czechoslovakia: a Nazi soldier points a gun at a mother, demanding milk and bread; a girl watches as the 4000 German soldiers camping behind her house are replaced by as many Soviets; a little girl pretends to be a mannequin in her grandmother’s shop to hide from SS officers.

The animated short documentary “Second Hand War” foregrounds wartime snapshots that didn’t make it to the history books, focussing on women’s experiences. The version of history portrayed is fragmentary and contradictory, privileging the fragile poetry of human subjectivity over verifiable facts.

Survivors’ memories are pieced together to create a subtle overview of daily life under occupation and what it meant to be a woman, while at the same time revealing the gaps in our collective memory.