Bára Anna Stejskalová
Directing
Biography
Bára Anna Stejskalová is director, art director, animator, and script writer of animated films, with a specialization on stop-motion. Beginning her studies at University of Arts at Bournemouth, she transferred to Prague's FAMU. In 2018 she participated in Erasmus internship in the Production Design department at IADT in Dublin. Her bachelor's film "The Fishermen" (2017) was nominated for BAFTA Shortlist. She is a co-author of project HEARDT, which received Burning Man Honorarium Grant and was show-cased at the festival. Her graduation movie "Love Is Just a Death Away" (2020) has toured world-wide festivals. She is currently working at Art Director on VR project Darkening directed by Ondřej Moravec.
Known For
A short film about ties and gaps between a child and a parent. The author rediscovers letters her dad used to write her from prison. That love seems to be gone now. She decides to write back in hope to find the connection again. She puts in writing what could not be said: blaming him for family´s break-up but also trying to understand.
Love, Dad
The ocean is paradise for Fran the shrimp. Nothing escapes her deadly pincers. For the blind fish Milva, it's a daily struggle for survival.Fran finds her magnificent and wishes she could see the ocean that way too. Will they be able to overcome their differences ?
9 Million Colors
A visually arresting interactive exploration of a space that represents the recesses of the mind and soul, lost in the dips of depressive and anxious states. The autobiographical narrative is a composition of fragments of stories and descriptions of inner turmoil, drawing the audience into an elaborate world of sometimes illustrative, sometimes metaphorical animations and ingenious sound design to understand the causes and experience of depression, the struggle to break out of its darkness, and the feelings of futility and heaviness. Open, almost diaristically intimate notes navigate the journey through rooms, floors and different environments that embody the manifestations of inner heaviness.
Darkening
When Rong was a small child she and her parents moved from Vietnam to Prague. Now she is grown up and remembers that time and what it was like to feel like a foreigner.
The Little One
A series of short family films created by FAMU students that have shone at international festivals: 659, Fear Nothing, The Basics of Art, We Are Closer to Death, Asylum, Red Shoes, and Sing.
FAMU v kině 02
Sometimes life starts after death for someone. Like for a little parasite, who walks with a rotting corpse of a dead dog around an old landfill. Trapped in his unpalatable body he tries to find love and friendship.
Love Is Just a Death Away
A story about fisherman, who pulled a skeleton out of the frozen lake. He tries to escape from the skeleton, so he hides in the dark, where he looks for comfort in cheap entertaintment. Yet the reality scratches on the window and fisherman´s hiding place quickly becomes a place full of nightmares. Manipulation, humanity, puppetry - the main themes of this film.