Shots for Monday Morning

My Paradise Is Darker Than Your Hell(cs)

Theatre director Jan Kačena poisoned himself in 2019 by inhaling fumes and suffered irreversible brain damage. While his partner makes a film as a declaration of love, he lies unconscious. In the film, the director follows moments in the everyday lives of three people close to him: Czech rapper Tyler Durden, painter Tadeáš Pochman and film director Helena Papírníková. In a naturalistic way, it captures drug addiction, self-destructive tendencies and family problems, which are the subject of intimate, often uncomfortable conversations. The result is a diary-style probe into the fate of the artistic bohemia of late capitalism.

Creature of the Sun(cs)

Childlike imagination, naive playfulness and an enchanted view of the world are at the centre of this poetic film. The child protagonists talk about their dreams, fantasies and experiences while touching on metaphysical questions of body and soul, life and death. Magic permeates every frame of this colourful collage.

VALE TUDO(sk)

Lucia "Pretty Beast" Krajčovič is a 34-year-old professional MMA fighter and mother of two children. Shortly after giving birth, she is determined to become a champion in both disciplines - sport and motherhood. With a baby in her arms, she is preparing for her next fight. Under the immense pressure of her two identities, exhausted from lack of sleep, she wrestles with a question to which she had a clear answer not long ago. How to be both Pretty and Beast and for how much longer?

Spirits and Rocks: An Azorean Myth(pt)

From the ocean, a volcanic island rises into steamy mist. The black rock of the earth stands in sharp contrast to the billowing vapor that hovers and drifts above the surface. A narrator describes how the island’s first inhabitants sought to explain the violent eruption by attributing the devastation to the wrath of angry gods. With breathtaking black-and-white cinematography, this poetic exploration considers the human relationship to this volatile land, where residents live alongside the looming threat of eruption with reverence, fear, and awe. A collection of scenes where dark and light miraculously coexist illuminates both the physical and spiritual landscapes of this extraordinary place, where life endures the perils of the natural world.

to boyhood, i never knew him(en)

Archive footage from 2006 - 2010 of a young girl growing up during the ages of four to eight. Only fragments of what is remembered exists. Words from a transgender man float to the surface as fleeting memories go on.

Rat Race : A Short Documentary(en)

Join College Student Parker Bennink and he interviews four of Rowan University's most prolific filmmakers, to uncover what life as a student filmmaker is really like in today's day and age.

Beautiful Solution(en)

The film poem about pesticides reflects on the return to the natural food chain, in which insect pest serve as food for the higher order. The harmonic cycle of life and death, the temple that is the wildflower field resounding with the inebriating sound of crickets chirping and wheat spikes rustling in the wind, is invaded by the human, the ultimate consumer with no natural predator.

SHITFACE(cs)

The film portrait of a face made of shit thematizes the individual's ideas about his own freedom. Antonín dolák, philosopher and YouTuber, feels free when he gets rid of all social conventions. He loses his face, takes off his mask and talks openly about the socially taboo topics that line his life. However, a conflict arises between him and the staff, when Dolak loses control over the depiction of himself.

Taurophilia(xx)

Through rhythmic re-composition of fragmented images, semi-surreal situations are explored in a documentary style of observation of a man's obsession with a powerful animal, the black horned bull, and the Spanish process of taxidermy through which he attempts to embody its beauty and strength, turning into a Minotaur. The subdued basement space in which the man meticulously studies the motionless flesh of the animal is preceded by a sunlit, empty arena in Spain, the stage in which the bull is presented in its full glory before facing man.

As Janelas Me Diziam Que Os Carros Cor De Lembrança Ainda Percorriam as Movimentadas Ruas do Esquecimento(pt)

Letter to L.Y(en)

Letter to L.Y is Stephanie Mavi Garcia Panclas' second experimental film for their class. The film surrounds the feeling of nostalgia shown through the layering of video.

Litanie(cs)

Elen Řádová and Tomáš Mašín’s student work draws on the genre of action films, which are characterized by emotionally intense and violent scenes. Excerpts from period blockbusters are supplemented with visual effects and edited in a way that drives the particularities of the action film genre to the point of absurdity. The resulting visual whirlwind thus deliberately escalates—and thereby diminishes—the dramatic impact of the original footage.

Gen A: Do What You Love(cs)

Jakub Strach aka NobodyListen is a successful Czech DJ and music producer. A portrait of his life and work can be seen as a manifesto of the millennial club-going generation. After hundreds of shows and preparations for the upcoming, renowned Addict party, the DJ must deal with the consequences of inflicting a wound scarring his image. Footage from the club backstage mingles with scenes of everyday life in which NobodyListen ponders the dark sides of the club scene, like drugs and misogyny. During the shooting, the Covid pandemic strikes, revealing the insecurities of work in culture.

Tangled Roots(en)

An intimate look into Demers family's experience raising children while dealing with the societal stigmas around disabilities and the consequences of Alberta's forgotten experiment in eugenics.

Passportless Mess(cs)

An idiot for some, a genius for others. Zoran is an urban legend of a Serbian block of flats who allegedly travelled the whole world without a single ID on him. After that, he went nuts due to politics, war and MDMA. “I saw it with my own naked eye,” nodded a half-blind old man. Though a clear answer to the question who Zoran really was is not to be expected at the end of this semi-serious manhunt, it is more than sure that even if he did not exist, the locals must have had to think him up.

Delírio Primaveril(pt)

The Gordon Affair(en)

As a small liberal arts college on the North Shore, Gordon College has not been without its issues. Budget cuts in 2019 resulted in the downsizing of several departments which impacted students' college career. In 2020 during the heat of the pandemic, racial tensions rise after hate crimes are committed on campus. This is the story of the class of 2022.

A Little Love(en)

Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of love, what it means, and why it matters.

CERN, or The Factory for the Absolute(cs)

Moravian Hellas(cs)

Karel Vachek’s graduate film offers us a documentary essay which is both a light-hearted and aggressive little piece and also a parody of investigative film journalism. The Strážnice folk festival, backed by the cultural Party apparatus of the time, for years had little to commend itself to authentic folklore. In the film the event assumes the form of a bizarre stage spectacle with almost surrealistic elements that Vachek reinforces with unconventional approaches (commentary appearing as titles on screen, singing, declamations into the camera, feature etudes, the fusion of news coverage and fiction). The result is a stirring film collage depicting various characters, from crowd-pleasers, Easter egg decorators, kitsch artists and peddlers, to museologists and local residents, all of whom come up against the eccentric "identical” twin reporters Karel and Jan Saudek and a bored actress who appears as an extra. Using their special blend of irony and wit, they present us with the sad truth.