To Meet the Film | A Low-level Flight

To Meet the Film
An encounter with film. _ This documentary mosaic presents a reconstruction of the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. The festival guests encounter the everyday atmosphere of a town that each year becomes the centre of a celebration of film; they become part of the stylised scenes, enter into the stories that begin to evolve, and engage in a dialogue, confirming that the relationship between the filmmaker, the work, and the viewer is never culminated. _ The film does not tell the history of the festival or relate its purpose, but it is an opportunity for an encounter between a group of five former jurors who come from Jihlava and the surrounding area and documentary filmmakers. The film's playful concept is augmented by the choice of themes and how they are realised through events that transform the entire town into a living cinema. _ Jiří Krejčík is a guest of Zdeněk Krásenský, a secondary school teacher, and takes part in a pre-election event at which both the town mayor and the district commissioner are present. Dressed in historical motorist attire Miroslav Kalina, a train dispatcher, rides through the Vysočina district with the author of the AutoMat project Martin Mareček and they discuss the future of railway travel. _ Milan Hanusek, a dentist, invites Kristýna Vlachová onto the roof of the Prior building where they together interview the architect of this structure that has dominated Jihlava's town square since the normalisation period. Vít Sedláček, a businessman, observes a meeting between Karel Vachek and a naked model, and the director Jan Šikl, a gest of Veronika Reynková, a book buyer and publisher, escorts a German who was expelled from the country in the post-war population transfer. _ Thinking through film!
*Czech version | English subtitles

A Low-level Flight
Amateur home film is the source of the films created in the cycle Private Century. The material, which at the time it was made was important to a certain group of people, today presents historical testimony that is exclusive (unofficial) for its details and tone it. After decades as celluloid memories, a family portrait takes on the form of a universally communicable story. _ A Low-Level Flight tells the story of Tána and Václav from the end of the 1950s to the start of the normalisation period. Václav was a fighter pilot in the Czechoslovak army. His wife played the role of an officer's wife, and after a time she and the family followed him to the Soviet Union. Infidelity and alcoholism gradually result in the marriage's break-up. _ In addition to describing the living conditions in a Soviet military housing estate, the film also presents the extraordinary footage that Václav filmed during test flights, which at the time he could probably have been imprisoned for filming. _ Šikl's visual archaeology is a unique meditation on the human condition. The director examines the existence of man as spread out across time and space through amateur home film footage. For the director these represent an important counterpart to the images of the past preserved in professional film productions. _ In a monologue Šikl emphasises the fatefulness of the actions of the individual figures in the film. For the director the interpretation of history is the surface against which he arranges the film shadows of his film heroes.
Czech version