Dust Games / Hry prachu

Thursday | March 22 | 8 pm

Czech Republic | 2001 | 100 minutes | director: Martin Mareček | director of photography: Jiří Málek, Vít Janeček, Vít Klusák, Martin Řezníček, editing: Petr Mrkous |

After having directed several student films (mostly philosophical essays concerning clear activistic statements about the current social, political, and ecological environment and a responsible attitude towards it - Maple 98, Theatre in a Sewage Plant, Methods of the Egg), Martin Mareček started to work on his graduation film, in which he managed to capture the preparations of the Annual Meeting of the IMF and the World Bank, held in Prague in 2000.

Using a modest set and a limited number of staff, Mareček started to monitor the twisted situation around this huge event, which had its pragmatical, political and social impacts while it confronted the domestic antagonistic and antiglobalistic tensions towards the event.

Martin Mareček appears a patient viewer capable to deal with extremist viewpoints and attitudes without being demagogic or cynical. His Dust Games are variations of political games in a broader sense, with their own rules and their relative value. All of the „actors“ of these dust(y) games are people and their special limited functions - from a common girl volunteering at the summit, a man selling expensive sleeping bags to antiglobalist protesters or the head of Blaník theatre and the organizer of primitive indoctrination programmes for high school students.

Theatrum mundi concentrated in this feature documentary, is packed with conflicting interests, beliefs, anger, and visions of profit, whether symbolic (political, social) or real (financial, emotional). Martin Mareček managed to create an extraordinary documentary, showing the local on the background of the global and the other way round. His film shows to the Czechs their own dullness, hypocrisy, and Philistine nature. It also points out that our local conditions very much depend on abstract political decisions made in the area of global politics.

Dust Games is a breakthrough documentary, an encyclopedia of Czech activist issues represented by a clever film. For this attitude and achievement, Mareček won the first prize for the best Czech documentary film of the year 2001 at the International Documentary Film Festival in Jihlava and also the Audience Award the same year.

Pavel Bednařík