Vojtěch Kopecký

A behind-the-scenes look at the eleven-year process it took to make The Painted Bird. The narratives of director Václav Marhoul and actor Petr Kotlár weave their way through the various stages of the film's creation, offering their subjective views from the beginning to the last flap of a year-and-a-half long shoot.

Director Tomáš Vorel created his experimental feature debut with members of renowned Prague non-traditional auteur theaters. The ensembles presented their own poetics and style through five "short stories" connected by satirical commentary by the "expert" Dr. Milan Šteindler, CSc.

In the second half of the 1980s, so-called critical films began to emerge, but they were afraid to make a sharper statement, moving on the basis of an engaged morality that wanted to improve the existing conditions cosmetically at best. The theme of the search for a new anchor in life becomes a central element: the protagonist, after returning from the war, does not want to devote himself to the constraints of elite sports, he rejects the dubious business of a friend. Most of all, he would be attracted to a perfectly ordinary job in a bakery. The dance clip inserts, however, make it difficult to navigate the already rather confusing narrative.