15. March 2017

East Silver Caravan

East Silver Caravan is a project of the Institute of Documentary Film in Prague which helps outstanding, but less validated, CEE documentaries achieve greater presence at film festivals.

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MY FATHER THE BANKER by Ieva Ozoliņa

“Who is my father? Was he really a criminal, who ruined the lives of four thousand people?“ Ieva Ozoliņa, a director from Latvia, has been asking herself these ruminating questions for a long time. In order to find the answers, she goes on a personal journey to find out more about her father. The documentary My Father the Banker is the result of year-long research. At the beginning of the film, only one thing’s for sure: that the economy professor Boriss Osipovs was involved in dubious trade which quickly made him into a millionaire shortly after the end of the Soviet Union. He started by selling western jeans, then founded a bank that was created to implode sooner or later. Osipovs was aware of the fatal consequences, but left his family in the dark. After an international arrest warrant was issued, the business man vanished into thin air. 15 years later, his daughter begins to pick up the pieces to reconstruct her father’s life. A hint leads her to a psychiatric hospital in Malaysia, where a patient strongly resembles Osipovs. But could he really be her father? And does she even want to see him again? Ieva Ozoliņa’s enthralling documentary creates a vivacious portrait of Latvia between communism and capitalism. It’s the captivating story of the winners and losers of an epochal system change.

MY OWN PRIVATE WAR by Lidija Zelović

The terror of the Bosnian War was the reason 22-year-old Lidija Zelović chose to leave her hometown of Sarajevo and flee to the Netherlands. Her family, friends and profession stayed behind. In this documentary, the former BBC war correspondent returns to her home country and tells the life stories of three generations and their different ways of coping with the past. The focus lies on the search for identity and the desperate need for explanations of experiences that left a deep mark in the minds of the victims and simply cannot be forgotten. But the process raises more questions than answers for Zelović. What would have happened if she had never left? Is there such a thing as good and evil? The filmmaker tries to fathom how war originates and how it instrumentalises people for its own purpose. With imposing images and some deeply emotional conversations, Lidija Zelović points out that war not only changes places, but also human beings. War does not only take place around people, but also on their inside – even in Zelović herself. This extremely personal, powerful and touching documentary about the effort to succeed in processing the shadows of the past is indeed a “brilliant essay” (Vrij Nederland).

SICK by Hrvoje Mabić

A nightmare that became reality: Only 16 years old, Ana was institutionalised by her parents, apparently because of her drug addiction, but in truth because she admitted to being homosexual. She spent a total of five horrible years in the heartfelt hell of a psychiatric ward. For a whole year, Croatian director Hrvoje Mabić followed Ana, by now a young adult, along her tough path through an equally tough life. Ana still painfully remembers how much she had suffered in the past under her father’s contempt and her mother’s lack of understanding, under the imposed restraints in the clinic, and from her resulting solitude. And she bluntly speaks about her current emotions, such as her feelings about the relationship with her girlfriend Martina or her desire for retribution in return for the misdeeds she had to endure. By participating in this touching documentary, where she turns her inner self outside for everybody to see, the protagonist’s efforts throw light on the issue, and evoke an understanding of her fate, which eventually allows her to overcome her trauma. The film ultimately takes a surprising turn for the better, moving far away from hopelessness and towards optimism and new vigour; something that not only does Ana good, but also the audience.

THE DANGEROUS WORLD OF DOCTOR DOLEČEK by Kristýna Bartošová

Dr Rajko Doleček is a man with two faces. Since the 1970s, most Czech people know him from television where, with tireless dedication, he tried to help people turn their lives around, and adopting healthier lifestyles with his nutrition and diet tips. Meanwhile less known to the public is the now 91-year-old professor’s closeness to Serbian nationalism and his tight friendship to the accused war criminal General Ratko Mladić. Doleček, however, never was cagey about his extreme opinions. For the medical doctor with Serbian origins, the genocide of Srebrenica is still nothing but fiction created by the Western World. Kristýna Bartošová is a young talented filmmaker of Bosnian descent. She convinces the old man to join her in visiting the site of the horrendous massacre. The young woman wants to get to know Doleček better and hence make him eventually acknowledge the genocide. Over the two-years of production the distinctions between black and white seem to blur. The filmmaker soon finds herself shifting between a deep-rooted political rejection of the Doctor and personal sympathy for him. An ambitious didactic film about prejudice and manipulation, as well as a prime example of the challenges of keeping one’s required distance in the role of a documentary filmmaker.