Late Night Talks with Mother

2D35 mmORES15
Director:Jan Němec
Premiere:15. January 2003
Length:69 minutes

Late Night Talks with Mother

Noční hovory s matkou; Jan Němec, 2001, versions: OR,ES, languages: ces

Film je premietaný v rámci cyklu Hommage: Igor Luther

Director: Jan Němec • Kameraman: Jan Němec, Petr Marek, Igor Luther, Vladimír Vízner, Vojta Dukát • Scenario: Jan Němec • Music: Jan Němec • Singing: Oskar Petr • Actors: Zuzana Stivínová, Karel Roden

An artistically experimental feature film with heavily autobiographical elements from the enfant terrible of Czech cinema, Jan Němec. The director carries out a cinematic-psychoanalytic probe into his own fate. In this cleverly stylised movie (a seeming counterpart to Kafka’s Letter to His Father) the protagonist entreats his dead mother to grant him absolution. Her profession as an ophthalmologist serves as one of the key formal motifs in a cinematic confession whose central “axis” is the Prague tramline running from the equestrian statue at the top of Wenceslas Square to the crematorium in Strašnice. Though the filmmaker’s forced exile temporarily removed him from places where he lived and where the most important people in his life appeared, the tramline became a metaphoric path: half intimately painful, half showy reconciliation with his own tempestuous life. Originally shot on video, the film took the Golden Leopard for video at the 2001 Locarno IFF.

Length: 69 min

Year: 2001
Local premiere date: 15. January 2003

Country of origin:

  • Czech Republic

Language version:

OR - Original version (czech)
ES - English subtitles

Film je premietaný v rámci cyklu Hommage: Igor Luther

Director: Jan Němec • Kameraman: Jan Němec, Petr Marek, Igor Luther, Vladimír Vízner, Vojta Dukát • Scenario: Jan Němec • Music: Jan Němec • Singing: Oskar Petr • Actors: Zuzana Stivínová, Karel Roden

An artistically experimental feature film with heavily autobiographical elements from the enfant terrible of Czech cinema, Jan Němec. The director carries out a cinematic-psychoanalytic probe into his own fate. In this cleverly stylised movie (a seeming counterpart to Kafka’s Letter to His Father) the protagonist entreats his dead mother to grant him absolution. Her profession as an ophthalmologist serves as one of the key formal motifs in a cinematic confession whose central “axis” is the Prague tramline running from the equestrian statue at the top of Wenceslas Square to the crematorium in Strašnice. Though the filmmaker’s forced exile temporarily removed him from places where he lived and where the most important people in his life appeared, the tramline became a metaphoric path: half intimately painful, half showy reconciliation with his own tempestuous life. Originally shot on video, the film took the Golden Leopard for video at the 2001 Locarno IFF.

Year: 2001
Local premiere date: 15. January 2003

Country of origin:

  • Czech Republic

Language version:

OR - Original version (czech)
ES - English subtitles