Barbora Berezňáková

Documentary encouraging the inter-generational dialogue about political event's impact on family lives in Czechoslovakia over the 20th century where the regime changed over four times in a hundred years. This film focuses on the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which has many similarities with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The still unexplained murder of former police officer Robert Remiáš in 1996, which appears to have involved the Slovak secret service at the behest of those in the highest places, remains a major blemish on the young Slovak democracy. The year before, the state directed the kidnapping of the son of the Slovak president, with whom the then Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar had a dispute. And Remiáš, who was the only witness to the kidnapping, became inconvenient...

The documentary is a continuation of the film on the events of August 1968 and presents the history told through individual testimonies and experiences. It is a diverse reflection on the transformation of society, its connection to the previously closed world around it, and getting used to the newly acquired rights and freedoms. It does not focus on the stories of faces familiar from the revolutionary tribunes, but on the small-scale reliving of small personal histories in the context of great social changes with the distance of 30 years of living in freedom.

The short documentary/experimental film is depicting intimate perspective, a surreal reflection of death and life through the rarely captured moment of the funeral of a deceased relative in the flare of poetic lenses. The film is a farewell to the vanishing world of the traditional Ruthenian community in the hills of eastern Slovakia. Metaphorically, a farewell to the personal worlds which are fading with the death of each of our ancestors. Visually highly subjective, dream-like black and white imagery brings the audience into the world of memory and inter-looping past and present.