Festival “must-see” films: tips from dramaturg Lea Petříková
The number of films from this year’s programme of the One World that have personally moved me is countless. The festival consistently succeeds in examining crucial social issues with remarkable precision, offering sensitive, thoughtful, and often surprisingly bold perspectives that sometimes push right to the very edge of social conventions or of what we imagine a human rights film should look like. Simply put, One World presents unseen, original, and sincere insights into what is happening in society and across the globe.
One of the themes running throughout this year’s program is the polarization of society. This somewhat overused term describing social fragmentation, mutual misunderstanding even among otherwise close individuals, and rising tensions caused simply by people’s inability to find common ground is approached by the festival as a challenge: to rethink the possibilities of communication and to remind us that the world belongs, and has always belonged, to all of us. Therefore, it is essential not to focus solely on ourselves and our immediate surroundings, but also to look beyond them.
How people can be both close and distant at the very same time is explored in the warm-hearted film with an almost epic title, Flood. In it, the director who holds progressive, science based views of the world returns to her family, and especially to her father. Though a popular science teacher, he is an almost fanatical advocate of a conservative Christian worldview rooted precisely in the biblical flood referenced in the film’s title. The seemingly irreconcilable life attitudes are brought closer together through the director’s cinematic and personal effort to communicate; together with her father, she even visits dinosaur excavation sites. The result is a humorous, touching, and at times chilling testimony about the chasms growing between us, even when we do not wish them to. I am looking forward to the discussion with the director on the festival’s opening day, March 12 at 20:30 at Ponrepo Cinema.
Another compelling film, Soldiers of Light plunges into the dark depths of the human psyche and suggestibility. In an almost unbelievably immersive way, we are drawn inside a strange community built in Germany by the wellness influencer Mr. Raw. What proves truly raw, however, is his blending of sources, information, truths, and lies as he advises his followers on fasting and vitality while constructing a fictional kingdom founded on extremism and sectarian principles. Our present moment is filled with blurred poles and their often dangerous nuances, and Soldiers of Light shockingly reveals how unclear the line between faith and conviction, health and fanaticism, or community and dangerous cultism can be. Sometimes, poles are legitimately opposed. One of the film’s directors will present it at the festival (March 13 at 20:30 at Ponrepo Cinema), and on March 15 a powerful panel discussion on the mixing of wellness culture, religion, and extremism will follow the screening at the Municipal Library.
We are invited into different, fantastical depths existing beyond the poles of quarreling humanity by the audiovisually striking film How Deep is Your Love. In the deep-sea, unexplored waters where the human body cannot venture and science must rely on powerful machines, creatures dwell that seem as if sent from outer space, glowing in neon colors and extraordinary shapes. But do we even have the right to look at them? This film less a conventional documentary and more an audiovisual poem of the deep ocean also addresses the environmental dimension of exploiting the underwater world through mining. Polarization, it seems, reaches even the ocean floor. I look forward to discussing all of this after the screening in the Large Hall of Světozor Cinema on March 14, where not only the film’s director Eleanor Mortimer will be present, but also editor Nicole Hálová, with whom I studied at FAMU in the same year.
Photo: Lukáš Bíba