Already in its third year, Made in Prague, the New Czech Cinema UK Tour, is a showcase of the best of contemporary Czech films, cherry-picked from festivals all over the world.

Stratford Picturehouse is hosting two films as part of the season:

PROTEKTOR (15)

Thursday 28 April, 8.30

This is one of the first Czech films to deal with the treatment of Jews during the pre-WWII Nazi occupation and the ensuing Protectorate. It deserves to be seen for this alone, not to mention the fact that it received six Czech Lion awards and the Krzysztof Kieślowski Award.

In 1938 Prague, reporter Emil and his actress wife Hana are both young and successful. However, the occupation and war deprive Hana, a Jew, of work and any sort of normal life.

Emil tries to save her by entering the German propaganda machine, but in a twist of roles and fate, in order to protect his beloved, he betrays love itself. His 'protectorship' becomes the same lie as the 'protectoral' role of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich instituted for the good of the Czech nation.

PROTEKTOR offers a gorgeously stylistic evocation of the era with samplings of Gershwin as it develops a bitterly sceptical reflection of the dark side of an imaginary Czech character. In Emil, human dignity loses out to careerism and attempts to compromise between the demands of those in power and his inviolable privacy.

KATKA (15)

Thursday 5 May, 8.30

Following MARCELA and RENE (both of which screened in Made in Prague tours), Helena Třeštíková brings us yet another remarkable observational documentary. This time the central character is a drug addict named Katka. We meet her in 1996 as a 19 year old in therapy, a young woman dreaming of normality, that one day she will have a boyfriend, live like her peers, and maybe even start a family. But in the coming years her life becomes an inescapable merry-go-round of constant drug use, theft, and ever greater physical and moral devastation.

It’s Katka’s awareness of the hopelessness of her existence and the momentary, desperate attempts to break her addiction that bring the filmmaker back in 2007. After a hiatus, Třeštíková returns and discovers that the 30-year-old Katka is still on drugs and now pregnant. From here, the unexpected pregnancy and the desperate struggle for the child’s future become the focal point. It is Třeštíková’s commitment to her subjects and the strength of hope that make her documentaries unique, unintrusive and respectful. She is one of the best documentary filmmakers currently working and KATKA is not to be missed.

Festival website

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