Anna Petruželová

A hole gapes in a house wall. A small flaw, something imperfect that we seldom consciously direct our attention to. Filmmaker Ondřej Vavrečka finds holes in every corner. His focus is on the imperfections of human existence. A hole can also mean an uncertain future, or an empty stomach. The gap that partners leave behind after a breakup. Ondřej Vavrečka does not only deal with visible holes. He looks at the incomplete from a philosophical perspective. He also lets a nuclear physicist, a theologian and an ethnologist have their say. He underscores their thoughts and theses with absurd everyday scenes: a woman with a chair on her head or an invisible skier. These scenes combine with interviews, sounds and stop-motion sequences to create a playful collage.

The primary motif of the documentary is the journey. A metaphorical journey, a spiritual journey, a tangible journey, a forest path, a road, a sidewalk, a drug trip, or a journey abroad. The director pastes together a collage of micro-stories of people and places that comment on the journey. Her documentary oscillates between playful absurdism, existentialism and existential questions, environmentalism, and social commentary. The dynamism and rhythm of the narrative are then determined by the jumps between different forms of video, such as analogue film, digital film, and mobile phone filming.

We all perceive poetry differently. For some, a poem is a rhyming text, for others a metaphysical experience. For director Kateřina Dudová, it is an experiment with three people who are close to her, whom she places in one room for three days, leaving them to their fate with the task of writing a poem. Sometimes the recording of real events is more poetic than the poem itself.

Dry ground, gravel, cracks in the asphalt, a look into a microscope or a weather map as links in an associative chain based on the motif of waiting for rain. The pictorial poem shows the soil in close detail and enriches it with new visual and semantic layers.