God’s Stone Quarry (One Year in North Bohemia)

A social documentary, the film explores the living and spritiual landscape of North Bohemia, fatally marked by the post-war expulsion of the German population, which also meant the expulsion of ancient cultural memory. After that, open pit coal mining augured decades of social engineering by the Communist state. Giant housing projects as well as agricultural soil recovered with painstaking work are the locations where the film was shot, between two Easter Sundays.

Seven approaches to the world, represented by a poet, a mining engineer, a wine-grower, a Roma family, a heavy-metal band, a farmer and ecologist – all carried by the director´s faith in the rebirth of the landscape.

In the conclusion, all of the people participating in the film meet in a forest – the branches are bare, in the background, the stone of some time-worn ruins, and as the people make their introductions and ask questions, they have in common the freedom that the landscape offers them as a choice.

Břetislav Rychlík brings an earnestness to Czech documentary. Always anxiously clinging to his independence, always ready to fight for himself, on his own – when the television domain decides to withrdaw its favors – he departs to look for his own truth, make films his way, write his way, passionate and quick-tempered – which does not make him less perceptive - on the contrary.

For a year, he patiently trudged back to the North, in order to show a different face of a landscape to which most Czechs have cultivated indifference, in order to shatter the prejudices about the borderlands, concentrating on the fundamentally human dilemmas of the Czech nation in the last several decades. His landscape is heavily marked by the past, but in fact takes place in the future tense of an awakened human consciousness (and conscience).

(source: catalogue IFDF Jihlava)