Peter Kerekeš

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Across the Border is a polyglot portrait of ideas about borders at the beginning of the 21st century. In an episodic journey five directors from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia, present their view and vision of nation, identity and Europe: By placing their personal cinematographic imprint on multifaceted portraits of their home countries, they open up a broad space for encounters with the strangers next door.

Slovak director Marek Kuboš has not shot a film in 13 years. His first film ever – a student exercise at film school – was a self-portrait. The circle is closed, the source of creativity has seemingly dried up. All that is left to do in the last self-portrait is to clean up after oneself, to recapitulate one’s successes and failures, and to bid farewell to one’s protagonists. This introspective meta-documentary is not so much a study of a creative crisis as it is a self-therapeutic process and an attempt at offering a comprehensive profile of the filmmaker at a time of unstable certainties. Appearing in the role of Kuboš’s consultants are essentially all leading Slovak documentary filmmakers.

Documentary about the Occupation, as seen through the eyes of the occupiers. Five countries from the Warsaw Pact occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968. Fifty years later, five directors from these five countries shoot five short films about the invasion from the perspective of the people who played the part of the occupiers.

What is “Slovakia”? How to explain the notion of “Slovakia” of the past 20 years to an unknown stranger, a visitor from another planet? What is the genetic makeup or the software for “Slovakia”? How to use it? How does it change? Slovakia 2.0 is a film about twenty years of independent Slovakia as seen from the perspective of ten film directors. It is composed of ten 10-minute films of different genres ranging from drama, through animation and documentaries, to experimental film. The ten recognised film directors who offer an answer to what is Slovakia include a wide range of generations, views and genres, namely Juraj Herz, Martin Šulík, Peter Kerekes, Zuzana Liová, Mišo Suchý, Ondrej Rudavský, Iveta Grófová, Peter Krištúfek, Viera Čákanyová, and Miro Jelok.

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A young filmmaker Ihor finds a hidden and unpublished photo archive of his grandfather Leonid Burlaka, a famous Soviet cinematographer. Discovering a man that he never knew well enough through the damaged pictures, he gets closer to his dementing grandpa, facing the tension between memory and forgetting.

Lesya has committed a crime of passion which brings her a seven-year sentence in one of Odesa’s women’s correctional facilities. She has just given birth to her first child, and now she is entering a world populated only by women: inmates, nurses and wardens, women of all ages, wives and widows, daughters, sisters, pregnant women, and women with children too. If not for the color of the uniform, it would sometimes be hard to tell who is who.

Peter Kerekes’ documentary focuses on the Bata shoe empire and the quest to find the next generation of shoe makers

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One phone call shakes Petra's life from the ground up. Her husband's fatal collapse causes Petra to become a widow from day to day. As she soon finds out, sadness and loneliness are not the only challenges she has to face.

A story of a mature man who comes back home from the city to take care of his dying mother. The mother’s passing, together with a meeting with his brother and a woman he loves, makes him reflect on the life he’s had and choices he’s made along the way. And then, just before her death, the mother tells Anatolii about a treasure she has buried inside the shed…

A documentary about army cooks and how the everyday needs of thousands of armed stomachs affect the victories and defeats of statesmen. The film is based on eleven meals based on recipes from the Second World War till the war in Chechnya; from France through the Balkans to Russia.

Angi Vera is a young nursing assistant in a hospital. When she speaks out against the appalling conditions, she is reprimanded, but the Communist Party takes her under its wing. She is sent for ideological training, where she learns to be an agitator in exchange for accommodation and meals. Meanwhile, she falls in love with one of her teachers, but she cannot live out her love within the walls of the strict school.

A comedy documentary about the search for happiness. The Italian astrologist Lucciana can alter the destinies of people. On their birthdays they have to travel to whatever location on Earth has the ideal constellation of planets over it. They will be reborn on that day and so be able to change their nature. On the one hand, the film follows the everyday (and unchanging) life of the fortune-teller who changes the lives of people while, on the other hand, it follows five protagonists who set out to various places in the world in order to change their lives.

A prominent Czech journalist Saša Uhlová leaves her family and joins “cheap labour force” in Western Europe. Undercover, she works at an asparagus farm in Germany, tries her hand as a maid at a hotel in Ireland and takes care of the elderly in France. She experiences first-hand the struggles of Eastern European low-wage workers whose sacrifice and hard work allow for the Western society’s comfort. What is the real price that Europe pays for exploiting its own citizens? How do the lives of economic migrants, who have been forced to leave their children and elderly parents, look like? And why are privileged Europeans looking the other way?

We follow the journey of former soldier Nassif, who fled the war in Iraq by hiding in dark cinemas. During this time, he used to watch his favorite film, “Papillon” (1973), starring Steve McQueen. Nowadays, he is looking for this film among the Iraqi cinemas’ ruins. The search for this lost film copy in the old and obsolete cinemas becomes the sole purpose of Nassif and his primary motivation to leave his house. “Take me to the Cinema” allows us to discover Baghdad through Nassif’s eyes as he takes us to streets that contrast with his silent and quiet world. A lot has changed in today’s Iraq. The street where cinema theaters were is now a market that sells military uniforms. It is crowded with young men, fitting military shirts and shoes. The quest for “Papillon” becomes the quest of character, who does not want to acknowledge the transformations of his city, and who wants to cling on to its luminous past through the light of cinema and his inner world.

Part documentary, part mockumentary and part stranger-than-fiction lesson in guerilla tactics, Velvet Terrorists is a quirky profile of three very different men and their former attempts to take down the communist regime of Czechoslovakia – by blowing the hell out of it. Having all spent time in prison for their crimes, one-time bombers Stanislav, Frantisek and Vladimir muse on their personal histories, the fall of the regime and their journey into middle age.

A documentary film about the Košice swimming pool, where history came to bathe. Seen through several stories which unfolded between the years 1936 and 2002, the film captures 66 seasons at the popular swimming pool, and the same number of years in the history of Central and Eastern Europe.