In response to this year’s festival theme, Lessons of Darkness, we contemplate the ways of watching and responding to images of disaster. Because of our constant exposure to violence, destruction, and suffering, there exists a risk that such devastating images will become ingrained in our daily lives and leave us indifferent.
The selected archival films take various approaches to exploring how our attitude towards the world is shaped by silence, denial, adjustment or simply a habitual redirection of our gaze, by which we allow the border of the acceptable to move.
Nocturne confronts the viewer with a grim world whose sense is constantly elusive. Black and white images create fragments of the world that has gradually disintegrated before our eyes.
Suicides Beware! tackles a darkness that was difficult to confront publicly at the time of filming. However, the film directs the camera into an area that the society mostly overlooked, demonstrating that indifference is frequently linked to unwillingness to confront the painful aspects of life, causing the problem to only seemingly disappear from the community.
In Prague Spring, the indifference shifts towards politics and collective memory. While talks about Jan Palach’s protest self-immolation echo in the background, life on Prague’s streets continues as usual.
In the Dark raises questions about community, memory, and fear. In a portrait of a man who spent more than thirty years at home, hiding from the authorities, the space surrounding him is given more attention than the individual. The village in the film becomes a setting for untold truths, unresolved conflicts, and historical wounds that become part of everyday life.
Mikolaš Farmer Worker’s First Holidays challenges these questions through satire. A film about a worker on his first-ever carefree holiday uses humour to reveal social hierarchies and mechanisms that allow certain inequalities to become normalised. It also portrays indifference as a set of daily habits and privileges and hidden borders that we often notice only after we’ve crossed them.
The experimental film Love Is Blue looks into what is most private – a romantic relationship. Images of intimacy, ordinary life, and commercials combine to form a collage that blends the social and the personal.
The films of the Deadly Indifference offer more than images of the past. They want to know what we see now, what we close our eyes to, and what makes the gaze become our responsibility.
