The film Occupation about last year’s holidays has set in cinemas. Finding him on the program was almost like a pioneering fighting game. But now you can hear about Michal Nohejl’s debut. A black-humorous drama about a theatrical party attended by a drunken Soviet officer during normalization became a sovereign winner on Saturday Czech Film Critics Awardswhen it turned four of the six nominations. In addition to the award for directing and screenplay for Vojtěch Mašek and Marek Šindelka, critics considered it the best film of the year, and Nohejl also became the discovery of the year. Thus, the situation of some past years did not occur, which did not allow many to sleep, when the best film became a film that was not awarded for screenplay or direction.
Together with Zátopek, who, on the other hand, did very well in cinemas, the Occupation has the most nominations for the Czech Lion. Nohejl’s film may discourage a seemingly unambiguous title associated with the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops after August 1968. However, it is not a standard historical film about the totalitarian past of the 1970s immersed in the normalization gray with the secret police and mental marasmus.
It goes beyond the highly stylized visual design and the internal construction of the world: with the passage of time and increasingly frustrated staff, the theatrical party becomes more and more insecure and unpredictable as the characters of the individual characters manifest themselves. On the one hand, the critics appreciated the film’s manuscript, which blurs the boundaries between psychedelia, dreaminess and reality, and on the other, the cadence screenplay, which is graduated precisely.
And at the same time, how form is connected with the message. The word occupation is more meant here more as a state of mind. As a metaphor for the mental contexts – relating to heroism, defiance, caution, opportunism or cowardice – the Czechs, as a nation, are constantly moving. In relation to one’s own history and position in it and in the world. They highlighted the sovereign manuscript and a different view at the expense of a well-done film craft in the biographical film Zátopek.
David Ondříček’s film about the life of the four-time Olympic winner Emil Zátopek is also set in communist totalitarianism, but it processes it more conventionally, in the spirit of the rules of historical, romantic and biographical film. Zátopek eventually succeeded in one category. Václav Neužil won the Best Actor Award for his emotional and focused portrayal of the title character. Critics named Pavla Gajdošíková in her premiere film role in the raw relationship film The Errors of Jan Prušinovský.
The third nominee in the Best Film category was the animated My Sun Mad by Michaela Pavlátová, about the experience of a Czech woman who married in Kabul. Pavlátová’s first feature film has already succeeded at the Annecy Film Festival and was nominated for a Golden Globe.
The evening opened with an award that may have remained in the shadow of larger categories such as best film or director, but at the same time it was perhaps the most exciting. The trophy for the short film was awarded for the second year and there were nominated films that have already successfully passed foreign festivals: Dear Dad, The Story of the Terrible Eliz and Red Shoes. The winning Dear Dad belonging to the animated documentary genre confirmed new strong impulses in Czech animation, as well as Red Shoes. Thanks to the work of the award-winning Diana Cam Van Nguyen, the personal experience of a large Vietnamese community living in the Czech Republic also comes into view of the general public.
The sovereignly made student film The Story of the Terrible Eliz then promises that perhaps the difficult and essentially non-existent genre of film for children and youth, which was so successful in our country before 1989, may shine for the better. Each nominee would deserve the award; none was in number.
The results – but also nominations – were more conservative in the Out of Cinema category, which awarded television or web series and other projects that are not primarily intended for cinema. Two Czech Television series were nominated: the distinctive relationship soap opera Kukačky and, in a good way, the public Defender, whose authors skillfully combined the format of a detective story with explosive cases involving Czech education. The last nominee was a warning and educational 13 minutes, which Vít Klusák built around the confessions of people who caused traffic accidents with fatal consequences. The Defender and Lukáš Vaculík eventually won the Critics’ Award in the role of the school ombudsman. The taste of the critics may thus rarely coincide with the taste of the general audience that the Defender addressed.
Among documentary films, Adéla Komrzý’s Unit of Intense Life on the End of Life and Leaving struck Czech critics the most.
As every year and at virtually any price, the result disappoints someone, pleases someone. However, if there is a consensus that one of the awards of the awards is a chance to draw attention to interesting films that, for whatever reason, have not been seen so much in the past year, but are worth noting, then the Critics’ Awards have worked as they should.
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