The Echoes of Jihlava

In the twilight of consumer democracy, priestesses of love come to life and wait for their customers. Prostitutes, sales clerks, warehouse workers, non-stop bars, dance clubs, musty flats. A subculture of insomnia that lives the eternal night. Unceasing dissatisfaction with one’s life and unfulfilled desires.
ZOOM Assembly-line production of gaming machines, tools for the consumption of human disorder and unhappiness. The lottery of prostitutes and nighttime wandering that defies angelic choirs of purity and modesty. Sonatas next to cheap hot dogs, shampoo, and the hopeless of housing projects.

Best Czech Documentary Film 2013.
 Screening will be followed by the DISCUSSION with the director Petr Hátle.

DJ Mr Ultrafino, coming straight from Czech Republic, with his vinyl collection of jazz, funk and soul from the 60s and the 70s.

Nearly 40 years ago, a young woman was murdered in Slovakia. To this day, the group of men who were convicted of this crime have tried in vain to prove that they are the victims of judicial terror. The director, who does not hide the fact that the sympathizes with the convicted, goes beyond their case and indirectly reveals doubts as to the trustworthiness of his country’s judicial system.
Only once do most of the convicted appear together before the camera: when their sentences are confirmed in 2006. More than the words, recriminations, anger, and sadness, the viewer remembers their exhausted expressions and the realization that they can never give up.

Special mention of the Between the Seas jury.
 Screening will be followed by a discussion with the director Robert Kirchhoff.

Consisting of amateur video footage of the Arab Spring uploaded onto YouTube, this documentary presents seven days of the uprising, captured from the inside. Blurry but unfiltered images of protestors, brutal police crackdowns, and destroyed cities show that the best way to understand chaos is to be a part of it.
When the cameraman asks a man standing on the street to describe the events of recent days, he answers, “This is the real Egypt. Before, we were living somewhere else. We are all pilgrims, emigrants, exiles.”

Best world documentary film 2013.
 Screening will be followed by a discussion with the director Peter Snowdon.

A Russian director puts together a mosaic or his country’s rural mentality deformed by government propaganda. The pre-election season in the Russian town of Achinsk is filled with the voices of the regime’s supporters, drowned out only by the chopping of ice on a Siberian lake. The regime’s skeptical opponents are already predicting the clear outcome.
The locals’ passivity and the election commission’s unspoken stance on the clear ballot manipulation culminate in the citizens’ inability to change the situation. Putin’s emotional tears following his victory are a visual metaphor for the artificiality of the entire election process in Russia.

Between the Seas competition section.

A film with almost no words, about things that people do not usually talk about. Army testing has turned an Italian army firing range into a dangerous place for people and all nearby living beings. Not coincidentally, it is a place reminiscent of the Zone in Stalker – a place that arouses curiosity precisely through its forced negation of life.
Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that does not interact with light. It neither emits nor absorbs light. Dark matter has no radiation and no shadow. And yet, scientists are convinced that it exists.

Opus Bonum competition section.