A YEAR IN A VILLAGE

A YEAR IN A VILLAGE

Director:  Petr Smělík

Category: Human Interest / Ethnology

Production: Petr Smělík / Czech Republic 2020

Language: Czech.

Subtitles: English

Length: 52 minutes

The documentary “A Year in a village” features a village in Moravia, Czech Republic. The focus is on 12-year-old Vojta and his father Danek, who are both into beekeeping and on Vojta`s 16-year-old cousin Anetka, who is preparing for her first participation in “hody” celebration, and of their grandmother Bohuška.
We watch the members of the family work and perform their hobbies. We listen to their opinions, trying to understand their thinking as well as the world they live in. Even though a part of the documentary features the traditional feast called “hody”, the aim is not to describe the event itself, but to understand how the characters feel about being a part of it and how it influences them.

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Festivals & Awards:

  • Best Documentary Film Award: ACAMPADOC International Documentary Film Festival, Panamá 2020
  • Prague Independent Film Festival, Czech Republic 2020

Movie Reviews: 
* « Filmed in the Czech Republic, ''A Year in a Village'' is the story of two young people raised in a rural community who ask themselves whether they would prefer to continue living where they grew up, or to settle in a big city. Through reflective dialogues and scenes that paint the simple routine of the place, the documentary manages to install doubts about what is important in life, about the value of identity, about happiness, to lead to another even bigger question that is suggested with the direct gaze of one of the protagonists into the camera, in the midst of that idyllic landscape of light, wind and green pastures. The question could well be: what do we live for?
Petr Smělík, the film director, explained that the idea of ​​the documentary arose with a question that every inhabitant of the interior of any country -like him- asks themselves at a certain moment in life: Do we stay to live in the town or do we emigrate to the capital? And the answer is almost always the second option and for a very specific reality: it is in capital cities where there is more opportunity for education and employment. For this very reason, ''A Year in the Village'' is significant: because it shows that, despite the distance and the need, the human being is who he has always been. »
Babilonia Editores / Acampadoc Documentary Film Festival

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