The Crying Of Angels

For more than a year the documentary filmmaker Zuza Piussi followed the fates of several Slovak homosexuals. In an evident effort to understand the film’s protagonists and communicate to the viewer primarily how they themselves see their role in society the film presents their everyday lives in invisible and heated conflicts with their environment. The relationship of the Slovak majority population to people with a different sexual orientation is strongly influenced by the Catholic Church, whose position of disapproval of homosexuality is also taken up by political parties and some parts of the media.

The film came to include parts of the TV musical competition Slovak Idol: The Search for a Superstar, which some of the film’s protagonists auditioned for.

One of the rooms in the film, two naked young men, the brief silence of the sexual organ. A different love is often associated with a sense of exclusion, the fulfilment of longing brings with it pangs of conscience, the knowledge that there is a huge gap between intimacy and tolerance. Intimacy takes the form of permanent conflict between man and society.

Although sexual orientation is a private matter and has no impact on the state, it remains a fundamental condition of coexistence in the public opinion, primarily its silent agreement with the position of the church. The church in turn embroils politics in its elementary objectives, creates a moral environment, and significantly influences the public space, including the media.

The film’s protagonists thus move within a strange hierarchy that they are often unable to escape from by any other means than shutting themselves off in isolation. In this modern sociological film the director focuses particularly on the relationship of the individual and established rules, factually examines what individual identification means in relation to the environment and fate, records gestures, emotions, and atmosphere, and does not shy away from explicit nudity in order to see into the existential position of a sexual minority against a backdrop of xenophobia (moral purity) among others.

The partner of the screening is International Documentary Film Festival Jihlava