Tereza Nvotová Goes to Cannes with project Father

Tereza Nvotová is the director of successful Slovak films such as Nightsiren (Pardo d’oro Concorso Cineasti del presente at the Locarno FF 2022), Filthy (world premiere at IFF Rotterdam 2017), and The Lust for Power (world premiere at IDFF Ji.hlava 2017). She is currently working on the mini-series Our People, which won the Best Project award at this year’s Series Mania Forum, and the feature film Father, produced by Veronika Paštéková of Danae Production, which will be presented at Goes to Cannes.

The film Father is inspired by the real-life case of a man who unintentionally caused the death of his two-year-old child. What drew you to this case? What aspect of this story did you primarily want to explore in the film?

When I heard this story for the first time—and realized it was not unique—I couldn’t even imagine it in a film. It felt too overwhelming for audiences. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Not because of the tragedy itself, but because what happened violated the basic principle that we all somehow believe in: that playing fair in life protects us from harm and that disasters only happen when we make a big mistake. Of course, forgetting a child in a car is a mistake, but according to scientific research, it’s a potential mistake that is hard-wired into all of our brains. If it doesn’t happen to you, you’re just lucky.

The fact that all of us could kill our own children in this way blew my mind. It made me empathize immensely with someone going through this experience. That’s why I decided to make a film about what it’s like to become a victim of your own brain. I hope the film provokes the audience to contemplate on their own, but most of all, I would like it to open people’s hearts, so that we accept our fragility and imperfections and do not judge others or ourselves too quickly.

The plot of the film mainly follows the aftermath of the accident. Do you focus more on the father’s experience or on the public perception of this heavily publicized case? To what extent does your film also consider notions of guilt, punishment, or empathy?

The film begins the morning leading up to the tragedy and follows the next couple of months from the father’s perspective. I’m fascinated by those tipping points which change the course of one’s life, especially when they occur in otherwise perfectly normal circumstances, on otherwise perfectly “normal” days. The theme of guilt and punishment is, of course, central to the story, but the court scene, for example, is important to me mainly from the father’s point of view. Apathetic to the legal consequences, he really only cares about his wife’s forgiveness, or lack thereof. The public, whether it is the media or the neighbours, functions in the film as part of a world in which the father is at first fully integrated, but after the tragedy, he is cast out into the void. The only anchor for him is his wife, who, however, is hardly hard hit by the loss of her child and needs to find her own way back to life.

The film is shot in very long takes. Why did you choose this technique?

It allows for greater identification with the main character. Time also passes differently in long shots, and the audience is able to project more, connect more, because the director isn’t dictating so much what they should be focusing on. Moreover, with these long shots, we can get into the father’s inner world, particularly during his dissociative states in moments of distress. We all know the feeling when we look down on ourselves as if from above, or when we drift away from reality in our thoughts. Using conventional editing methods to depict these moments seemed heavy-handed to me. In a single shot, the external and internal reality come together naturally, because we are used to looking at the world through our own eyes.

What stage is the project currently in? When do you expect it to be completed?

At the moment, we’ve shot the second half of the film, set during winter. We plan to shoot the first half this June. We’ll start post-production right after that and the film should be ready early next year.