ONLINE SCREENING SELECTED FILMS - WINNER SECTION 2021

The films will be available online until December 15. You can pre-purchase tickets for online screenings here:

RED
POLAND
KARINA WEGIELEK

Cigarettes, keys, a cell phone, a wallet – an unfinished life lying in a plastic police bag on the kitchen table. A father and daughter’s eyes meet as they take in the evidence of absence, silently measuring the distance between life and death. From the depths of the bag comes the sound of a phone ringing. That sound will become the echo of human grief.

The movie RED is about the scraps of life of Judyta and her father Zbigniew, shown across several days following the death of Judyta’s brother, Marcin, killed in a car accident. As they try to come to terms with the void left by a loss of a loved one, all their mutual resentment and finger pointing is unexpectedly interrupted by a stranger: Red.

Will he accept all the blame? And will it be enough? Will Judyta and Red be drawn closer together? Can anything new grow upon the sense of guilt? And what hides behind Zbigniew’s loneliness and heavy drinking? And who - really - deserves the noose the most?

QUENN
NORWAY
MARI ORSTAVIK

Ine, at 25 years old, realizes she has grown into a life she hasn't chosen herself. In an attempt to awaken both herself and her uninterested boyfriend Petter (26), she goes to a pole dancing class where she meets Rebecka (24) - a girl that is everything Ine isn't.

Through Rebecka, Ine gets a glimpse into a world she has been completely isolated from - a world where people fight for the freedom to be themselves completely unfiltered, and where colors and glitter steps into place for the grey, squared life she has been leading.

Ines fascination with Rebecka grows into something she soon wonders if is infatuation. But is it Rebecka she is infatuated with, or is it her life?

LETTERS FROM BRNO
USA
JEFFERY GARY

"Letters From Brno"is a documentary that describes a powerful personal story of parental love and unspeakable tragedy. The story begins when I first learned that my mother was Jewish. She refused to speak about her past and I began searching for answers to the puzzle of what had happened to her, why didn't I have grandparents, and why was she incapable of talking about her family? The film uses interviews of myself, my siblings, and my son along with archival footage, photographs, documents and the letters from my grandparents during the years 1939-1941. My grandparents put my mother and her younger sister on a Kindertransport in 1939 from Prague to London. In 1942, my grandparents were murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. Their 75+ letters, written to my great-aunt who escaped Czechoslovakia and landed in America, are eye witness accounts of those 3 tragic years.

SMILE OR DIE
GERMANY
KRISTIN JAKUBEK, ALENA KROKER

'Smile or Die' is a dystopian vision of a world in which every smile is forbidden. Featuring the graduate collection of the Finnish fashion designer Mirjami Nyman the fashion film is questioning the length to which we go to achieve happiness

LILA
POLAND
KACPER SWITALSKI

Title character Lila struggles with PTSD. As a therapy she made a video blog for her brother, who since the tragic accident stays in coma. The movie is inspired by Dominika’s Trybulec life. Dominika is a co creator of the movie and also played a main character in it. “Lila” is made only with a smartphone and it is an effect of cooperation with Oppo brand and New Horizon festival.

SEARCH OPERATION: THE NEW TOWN SURVIVOR
KOREA
MINGU KANG

A mysterious woman travels around various places in the city and discovers clues related to her identity.

MAKHOM
RUSSIA
LEILA RASTYAMOVNA SALAKHATDINOVA

Another era… Backyard friendship, first love, collisions, where the cost of a mistake is high. The nineties. It’s the tough time in Russia, the time of dangerous turns and high speeds.
Mansur is a guy from an orphanage who lost his beloved and loving parents and matured early.
Streets and Boxing Ring are Mansur’s (nicknamed Makhom) world for many years.
The man who became his father, Bach, tries to persuade Mansur to leave the streets.
In many ways, a girl who means a lot to Makhom, Knizhnitsa, changes his worldview.
But, whoever is standing by a person on one side or the other, the choice is always his.
The choice remains for “Makhom”.

WINTER WILL NOT BE
RUSSIA
DMITRI FROLOV

"There will be no winters" - a film consisting of 14 short novels, each with its own plot and a musical theme. In fact, this is a screen version of the same album of Russian avant-garde singer Leonid Fedorov.
A dark, abstruse text is as much an equal part of music as a double bass or a rustling sound that produces sounds to the beat. The last thing is actually a fragment of a telephone conversation, a song about Lady Diana - a song that the legendary avant-garde poet Anri Volokhonsky recites to Fedorov on an answering machine.

KILL YOUR DARLING
CZECH REPUBLIC
DIMITRI KANJUKA

The writer of detective novels has to travel to another dimension to save many lives.

online screening SELECTED FILM -
OFFICIAL SELECTION

ACT LIKE IT

A struggling actor is so focused on getting back to his glory days of moderate success that he neglects those closest to him.

Director: Peter Hallin (Sweden)

HOLODOMOR

Themes such as Soviet superiority at the time, fathers, brothers and sisters who died, the suppression of the Ukrainian spirit, the consequences of communism, and religion as a source of consolation all find their place in the protagonists' answers.

Director: Hemlock (Germany)

THE FIRST OUTBREAK

January 2020. Chinese New Year started when several cases of viral pneumonia have been detected in the city of Wuhan. A few days later, the epidemic is real, and chaos takes the province, the country... and the whole world. This film shows the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in its epicenter. Be prepared for a unique document inside Wuhan houses and hospital rooms. It is not about the numbers, but the feelings of the real people who suffer this terrible disease.

Director: Luis Galán, Ramón Campoamor, Haiyan Tan (Spain)

MIRIAM - Marek DYJAK

This music video is depicting the transport of convicts to the extermination camp. The minimalist picture is preserved in the colors of black and white.

Director: Sebastian Juszczyk (Poland)

SAFE DISTANCE

Olek returns to Poland after a few years. He must be in quarantine, but his family refuses to let him in. He has nowhere to go, so he sits in the staircase. Władzio wants to walk his dog, which is about to blow up, but he cannot pass. He has to keep two meter distance and Olek doesn't even have a mask. Arguing with his former neighbor, Olek confronts his lost love, learns to close this relationship and is ready to face the unknown.

Director: Artur Wyrzykowski (Poland)

DORA

Dora turns 16. Strangely, for some time now,
she has been eating like an ogre and locking
herself with her friends for long hours around
a strange thing, stirring up her mother’s sick
curiosity.

Director: Joanne Delachair (France)

HIDE AND SNIFF

“Hide & Sniff” is a hard-boiled love story that challenged a new technique: focusing on the sense of smell.
The wife has a good nose, and the husband is a bit dull. The story shows the peculiarity of their love as their feelings grow apart. This is an aspirational film challenging on showing smell – something that obviously exists but cannot be actually seen.

Director:  Kousuke Hishinuma (Japan)

ŠÁRKA

It is 1948 in Prague, Czechoslovakia and the Communists have taken over. Anyone who is not with the Communist Party is in danger. TOMAS, a veteran of the Czech resistance who has joined the Party, tries to save his anti-communist friend, the cowardly JINDRICH from prison or, even worse death. Between these two men is SARKA, the pregnant wife of Jindrich, who above all wants to protect the future of her unborn child.

Director: David Polcyn, Erik Rodgers (USA)

DIES IRAE - DAY OF WRATH

Inspired by “Qatsi trilogy”(Koyaanisqatsi,1982) and Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity, this film shows with a critical point of view with fantastic overtones, the director's vision of destroyed spaces and isolated human beings in empty cities: Citizens inside home, watching helplessly as hundreds of thousands of people disappear due to the global health crisis in the new normal as the absence of normality.
However, the machinery of the globalized world has continued to destroy or operate in automatic mode for rebuilding everything that guarantees its development. It doesn´t matters if the zoonosis produced by an animal virus that could infects humans’ beings occurs by intensive animal farming, nor the eternal threat of global warming of the planet. All guilt is immediately forgiven to foster economic growth

Director: Nacho Gutierrez (Spain)

NANAKOROBI

A story by Glenna Burmer based on the Japanese saying Nanakorobi-Ya Oki, or fall seven times, but get back up the eighth. A little girl faces seven challenges to save an orphan who is lost in the snowy woods of Hokkaido.

Director: Glenna Burmer, Gaby Breiter (USA)

#KIDSONTECH

Parents and teachers around the world struggle with their kids’ dependence on devices today. As Covid has forced our kids to rely on technology more than ever, “#KidsOnTech” looks at the impact on children’s developing bodies and brains, and asks: “How might we better prepare our kids for this digital world?” Voices from India to the U.S., France to China, Mexico to Japan explore what children need to truly excel in a future dominated by tech, including a Google designer, a German brain scientist, and New York Times journalist, Matt Richtel, whose story on a Silicon Valley school created an international media frenzy.

Director: Paul Zehrer (USA)

ON/OFF

Endless distractions threaten to destroy creativity.

Director: Nicolas P. Villarreal (Argentina)

© Brno Film Festival 2021