Czech documentary film director Klára Tasovská will present the world premiere of the film I’m Not Yet Who I Want to Be, which she made about photographer Libuša Jarcovjáková, at the Berlinale festival in the German capital in February. This was announced on Thursday by the organizers, who included the Czech Republic on the prestigious list of participants. The event will take place from February 15 to 25.
The portrait of award-winning photographer Jarcovjáková was co-produced by Slovakia and Austria, and will be screened in the Panorama section of the Berlinale. In it, the film will compete for the Audience Award.
A graduate of the new media studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Tasovská is one of the greatest talents in Czech cinematography. She participated in the creation of the documentary Gottland, and with her colleague Lukáš Kokeš directed the titles Fortress and most recently Nothing as before, which was an insight into the lives of teenagers growing up in a small Czech border town.
Libuše Jarcovjáková graduated from FAMU in Prague, but worked mainly in blue-collar professions. At the end of normalization, she went to West Berlin, where she made a living as a maid. She photographed events in a Prague gay club, the Vietnamese community in Czechoslovakia, and other marginal topics. Her out-of-focus, overlit images defied all compositional rules. She also constantly recorded herself, even in domestic situations.
In the 1990s, after returning to Prague, she taught at the Secondary School of Graphics, known as Hellichovka, but she was “discovered” only in the last decade. The Association of Professional Photographers of the Czech Republic named her personality of Czech photography for 2017.
Two years later, Jarcovjáková was one of the stars of the international photography festival in Arles, France, where she showed pictures depicting the hidden aspects of life in normalizing Prague. The British newspaper Guardian ranked it first in its top 10 most important photographic events of the year. The French Le Monde and the overseas New York Times reported on her with appreciation. The director of the show compared Jarcovjáková to the American star of underground photography Nan Goldin.
Last year, the Czech was nominated for Photographer of the Year in the Czech Grand Design Awards. “The response after Arles was such that I had to create some kind of resting position to rearrange things in my head and protect myself from the many impulses,” she said in an interview with Aktuálně.cz. According to the server, Jarcovjáková was ahead of her time with her deeply empathic concept of reflexive photography, her interest in socially overlooked topics and her portrayal of her own face and body.
The management of the German festival has so far announced 11 films that the audience will see in the Panorama category. Seven of them will have their world premiere at the Berlinale. The organizers will publish the complete program on February 6. The festival was founded in 1951, along with the shows in Cannes and Venice, it is one of the most recognized in Europe.
Video: Taking photos in a gay club was paradise, says Jarcovjáková
“Back then it wasn’t called a gay club, but a boozy club. The society that socialized there was like a family,” Libuše Jarcovjáková told DVtv last year. | Video: Daniela Písařovicová
