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DocAlliance FilmsOverview
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.
Other films by Karel Vachek
Communism and the Net, or the End of Representative Democracy
2019
Obscurantist and His Lineage or The Pyramids' Tearful Valley
2011
Záviš, the Prince of Pornofolk Under the Influence of Griffith's Intolerance and Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday or the Establishment and Doom of Czechoslovakia (1918-1992)
2006
Who Will Watch the Watchman? Dalibor, or the Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin
