Over the Hills
Father and son Vít and Grisha travel to Russia to visit the boy’s mother and sister. Why did their previously harmonious family split in two? A documentary road movie about the distance between two Slavic countries, the difficulties of fatherhood and puberty, and the alienation between people who should, in theory, be the closest of all.
Martin Mareček
Director
Also Directed by Martin Mareček
A carefully composed observation of two newsrooms which, in March 2017, were avidly chasing after information about the Czech president’s decision whether or not to run for re-election. Two teams of reporters, one extraordinary event, and two takes on one "objective" piece of news.
In 2006, Milan and Tomas electrified a school campus and a hospital in a detached Zambian village. After four years, they return for the last time to find out about their system's failures, repair it and hand it over at last. The film follows them through chaotic days as well as pitch black nights and provides a fresh insight into the pitfalls of humanitarian development projects. Short circuits of all sorts, blending and dissolving of different worlds, rituals of gratitude and concepts of solutions. With no attempts to declare or evaluate anything, Solar Eclipse becomes a situation probe examining various forms of light and darkness. Will the two Czech linkboys succeed in lighting up the Zambian bushland?
The desire to achieve the greatest physical strength and moments of complete lack of mental strength define the life of film critic Kamil Fila during the filming of this atypical time-lapse documentary. The necessary moment of observation is broken in a longer period of time by the protagonist’s attempts to bring his life into harmony with the people closest to him, which, nevertheless, regularly lead to failure. The result is a portrait of an intellectual at his wits’ end, a man who struggles with the limits of rationalisation. It is precisely the openness with which Fila lets us peer into the depths of his private life that has a therapeutic effect not only for him but also for the viewer.
