Finale Plzeň is an annual showcase of contemporary Czech film and TV production. The program of the 37th edition, which takes place on September 20 – 25, 2024, includes a number of Slovak films.
In the Feature Live Action or Animated Films Competition, seven Slovak works are competing for the Golden Kingfisher. The first fiction feature of the award-winning Czech documentary filmmaker Veronika Lišková, Year of the Widow, which follows a woman’s coping with the sudden loss of her husband, will be presented in world premiere. The selection also includes Her Body by Natália Císařovská, a story of Czech high diver and porn actress Andrea Absolonová; Adam Martinec’s tragicomedy about the village celebration, Our Lovely Pig Slaughter, a psychological drama about deep-rooted fear, Calm in the Canopy by Michal Hogenauer; Beata Parkanová’s intimate family drama about a six-year-old girl dealing with her parents’ marital crisis, Tiny Lights; a look at the events of August 1968 through the eyes of the Czechoslovak Radio’s international news office, Waves, directed by Jiří Mádl; and the animated feature Living Large by Kristina Dufková about a young boy struggling with his weight, who ultimately learns that it’s not a person’s appearance that truly matters, but how they feel about themselves.
In the Documentary Film Competition, six Slovak works are vying for prizes: a story about the friendship between a girl and a boy who are hiding from the war in the Kharkiv metro station, Photophobia by Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík; Sonia G. Lutherová’s view of the Slovak-Czech family, one member of which is going through a transition, A Happy Man; a portrait of photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková, I’m Not Everything I Want to Be by Klára Tasovská; another collaboration between director Apolena Rychlíková and reporter Saša Uhlova, which examines the working conditions of the precariat, The Limits of Europe; Marta Kovářová’s film about her to father, physicist and environmentalist Jiří Svoboda, The World According to My Dad; and an intimate look at the life of a teenage woman who grows up in the shadow of a sister with autism, The Other One by Marie-Magdalena Kochová.
As part of the First Catch section, intended for premieres and pre-premieres, the audience in Plzeň can see Viktor Tauš’s new film, The American, about growing up in an orphanage and searching for freedom; and a documentary about Czechoslovak post-war architecture, Czechoslovak Architecture 58–89 by Jan Zajíček.
Another seven Slovak films will be presented in the In the Nets of 2023-24 section. The Last Aristocrat 2 is a sequel to Jiří Vejdělek’s successful comedy about a slightly crazy family who regained the family castle after the Velvet Revolution. Brothers, directed by Tomáš Mašín, tells the story of the resistance group of the Mašín brothers from the beginning of the 1950s. In I Don’t Love You Anymore, Zdeněk Jiráský follows two teenagers running away from home. Bohdan Sláma will present two films: Dry Season reflects on the climate crisis in the Czech context, while The End of the World returns to the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia. Two other films were inspired by real serial killers: Petr Hátle made a film Mr and Mrs Stodola about this infamous couple, and Radim Špaček took a closer look at the life of Viktor Kalivoda in the film The Forest Killer.
Slovak films can also be found in the Czech Traces section. Réveillon by Michal Kunes Kováč deals with coming to terms with the past in the early 1990s, while Jakub Króner’s MIKI, set in the same decade, takes a close look at organized crime in Slovakia. Iveta Grófová’s drama The Hungarian Dressmaker returns to the period of the Second World War, Roman Bondarchuk reflects on contemporary Ukraine in the film The Editorial Office, and genre cinema is represented by Peter Bebjak’s mysterious Whirlwind.
