Crew
Jan Jedlička is one of the best kept secrets in the world of art. He was born in Prague in 1944 where he studied painting at the academy before immigrating to Switzerland in 1969. Petr Zaruba conveys through cinematic and formal choices the complexities of Jedlička’s creative strategies. An intertwined dialogue between two artists.
After the premiere, the theatre group gathers in a bar to celebrate. However, the cheerful gathering is interrupted by a drunken Soviet officer. He insists on selling a can of petrol. However, when he senses the awkwardness, the hidden hatred, the cowardice, the timidity of the people there, he begins to enjoy the situation with his intrusiveness. When he takes his pistol out of its holster, things start to get crazy. The people in the bar suddenly become “freedom fighters” against the Russian occupation.
A wealthy middle-aged man at the airport witnesses a tiny incident involving an unknown, perhaps Arab, young man and airport staff. After the young man is confronted directly at the airport toilets, he feels himself subject to an indefinable but increasingly serious sense of danger. The fear of the evil that had, as it were, encircled the man since then, gradually becomes an obsession. The urgent desire to see the evil, to confront it and destroy it.
The father falls into a coma. The mother and son silently concentrate all their powers. They meekly accept the diagnosis but resist the verdict. Yet they reject an open conflict because the life thread is so taut that conflict could inadvertently break it.
