Igor Kovács

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Copying videos illegally on a mass scale is one thing, but making a marketable product out of them is quite another. Just think of the most basic problem: language – your average customer won’t be a polyglot! The answer to that problem all over Central and Eastern Europe was a practice called rychlodabing, or speed dubbing in Czech, which consisted of one sole actor voicing all characters, with the original voices usually still audible beneath. This is how millions of people in the ČSSR encountered many forms of cinema for the first time in the 1980s, and how many foreign words became lodged (in a corrupted fashion) in everyday language. Some expressions (often curse words) were born. That’s popular culture at its liveliest. Video Kings is an oral history monument to the art of rychlodabing and some of its masters, as well as a collective reminiscence from a time of political transformation, and how ordinary people were agents of that change in extraordinary ways.

In a research station in the Soviet military area of Beregavoye, a gas was developed to destroy the armies of the enemies of socialism. However, the gas experiment got out of control and had to be shut down. The remaining smoke bombs reached us during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Later, during a conscription exercise for high school students in 1985, gas from a stray smoke bomb infected students. A small group of students struggle to survive with their infected, aggressive classmates, but also with the schoolmaster Sergei, a former Red Army special forces officer. The infected students become biting and killing beasts. They fight with saw, club and red flag.