Landscape of My Heart

Like Late Night Talks with Mother (2002), Landscape of My Heart is another auto-documentary drawing on the poetics of both experimental reality shows and film essays. Here, director Jan Němec investigates the reality of his life, of fate and time. Demanding heart surgery, which he underwent at a Prague hospital, became the starting point for a meditation on life and death. A visit to Prague by American president George W. Bush and his wife Laura creates a parallel storyline of a similar documentary nature. ‘Small’ intimate history thus flows into ‘big’ history, which Němec integrates into the personal current of his own life course. The tools the director uses are not only reality and imagination, but also a standard camera and the 35 mm film stock that he and his fellow filmmakers use to arrive at the distinctive character of this motion picture. (source: Catalogue 40th Karlovy Vary IFF)