Vostodvacet

Students of the fourth year of the Department of Alternative Theatre at the Prague Theatre Academy (DAMU) and a student of documentary at FAMU locked themselves in the theatre rehearsal room Řetízek for 120 hours on Saturday 7th May of this year. Isolated from the outside world, the hours that were supposed to be filled with a creative process started to pass, becoming in turn an emotional psychosis.

A surprisingly fresh view on the emerging generation of actors that in fact derives from psychological experiments and acting improvisations, it more than anything reverbates with the social phenomenon of the reality show, even though here the public intimacy is not mediated by cold television eyes, but by the subjective camera of a film director.

When after a hundred and twenty hours the door opens and the students are able to get out, one of the young actresses bursts out crying. Suddenly one feels like a witness to another person‘s breakdown, which goes far deeper than the conflicts and confessions of an acting class, and that like them we have lost out in the petty squabbles, disappointments, suspicions and invective.

At first we are watching a game. It doesn´t seem possible that something would really get to the exalted actors, until the moment when deep inside something gives way, and they remain alone with their loneliness and a sense of their own human as well as artistic powerlessness.

The documentary and theatrical experiment with clearly set out rules and an unpredictable result together with the luxury of television entertaiment, simulating a reality full of conflict, show us the inability of a certain mentality to understand what it sees, to think in terms other than those of dramaturgy, the inability to penetrate deeper than to the level of a story whose stereotypes in the end entrap one´s vision. An identical reduction of a collective to a primitive gang, preserved by the living memory of documentary, the film is compelling for the questions it provokes, the object of which are ourselves.

(source: catalogue MFDF Jihlava)