Daddy and Lili Marlene, A Low-Level Flight/Tatíček a Lili Marlén, Nízký let

Thursday | May 17 | 8 pm

Czech Republic | 2005, 2006 | 2x 52 minutes | screenwriter and director: Jan Šikl | editor: Jan Daňhel, Šimon Špidla | sound editor: Daniel Němec |

“Our lives are unique and unrepeatable. The Private Century series shows the history as a set of intimate human stories. Their intensity can adress also the others because the fundamental events happen in the lives of each of us.”

The Private Century, a unique project done by Jan Šikl, makes use of extensive though little known amateur footage from individuals, thus creating a different image of the troubled twentieth century. The project, not yet finished, comprises so far of six one-hour long documentaries, each focusing on one member of a family and telling of their decline and fall – King of Velichovky focuses on the head of a German farmer family living in Sudetenland before WWII; Daddy and Lili Marlene, a sequel to the King of Velichovky, is narrated from the point of view of his granddaughter and tells of the disintegration of the family in the dramatic 1950s. Statuary of Granddad Vinda is a story of a non-conformist Moravian sculptor, the author of a Klement Gottwald sculpture, which, together with The Stoke of Butterfly Wings reveals the hidden, personal face of communist ideology from the perspective of its followers.

Small Russian Clouds of Smoke and A Low-Level Flight return to the family concept – they tell a story of Russian families that emigrated to democratic Czechoslovakia and settled here despite the unfavorable political situation after 1948. Low-Level Flight is a recollection of a daughter of a Russian who married a Czech Army pilot, accompanied him on his ambitious career to the Soviet Union, and whose marriage collapsed, as well as the Czechoslovak democratizing process, after the invasion in 1968.

The stories of The Private Century contrast the official history of “big” events and personalities with personal histories of their victims. The heroes of the Private Century films are mostly anonymous “crowd people” facing personal twists and catastrophes on the background of political turmoils. The form of family movies that Jan Šikl uses in this cycle is an unprecedented homage to hundreds of amateur filmmakers who never had a chance to hit the screen but who give voice to and rehabilitate the memory of the silent majority of the nation.

Veronika Klusáková