Jan Hřebejk
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jan Hřebejk (born June 27, 1967 in Prague) is a Czech film director. He studied together with his frequent scriptwriter Petr Jarchovský at middle school and, from 1987 to 1991, at FAMU, an arts college in Prague for film and television, studying screenplay and dramaturgy.
During his FAMU studies, Hřebejk directed and produced two short films, Co všechno chcete vědět o sexu a bojíte se to prožít ("Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Experience", 1988) and L.P. 1948 – 1989 to a script by his classmate Petr Zelenka. His professional directorial debut was a short film for Czech TV, Nedělejte nic, pokud k tomu nemáte vážný důvod ("Don't do anything, if you don't have good reason", 1991). His films caught the attention of viewers and critics, and entered student film festivals.
Together with Petr Jarchovský, he a wrote, during his FAMU studies, a comedy screenplay, inspired by his background at a pioneer summer camp, Pějme píseň dohola ("Let's Sing Around"). This screenplay was filmed as a full-length feature by director Ondřej Trojan and cameraman Asen Šopov in 1990.
Contents |
[edit] Filmography
- Dobročinný večírek ("Charity Benefit", 1992)
- Šakalí léta ("Big Beat", 1993)
- Kde padají hvězdy ("Where Stars Fall", 1996)
- Pelíšky ("Cosy Dens", 1999)
- Musíme si pomáhat ("Divided We Fall", 2000)
- Pupendo (2003)
- Horem pádem ("Up and Down, Loop the Loop", 2004)
- Kráska v nesnázích ("Beauty in Trouble", 2006)
[edit] Šakalí léta
It was a time of poverty and political darkness. A time, when families gathered to watch the first television screens, when kids collected the packages from American cigarettes, and when a whole generation sought escape from a bleak socialist future. When "Baby" arrives in a suburb of Prague one day in the summer of 1959, he brings along more than just his guitar and flashy clothes: he brings a rock 'n' roll revolution. A story about the generation gap; a story of breaking rules and breaking rules; but most of all, it's about how music can change a whole generation. Set in Dejvice, a working-class neighborhood of Prague, and centered around the Hotel International, Šakalí léta follows the lives of a gang of kids and teenagers, who, thanks to "Baby", find out there's more to life than the well-ordered system they've been taught to obey.
[edit] Pelíšky
This bittersweet coming-of-age story is set in the months leading up to the ill-fated 1968 Prague Spring. Teenager Michal Šebek (Michael Beran) develops a serious crush on his hip neighbor, Jindřiška Kraus (Kristyna Novakova). The problem is that his family is headed by a dull-witted army officer who believes that the latest East German Tupperware will sufficiently shame those American imperialists, while her father is an ardent foe of the Communists saved from prison only because he is a war hero. Much to the parents' dismay, the younger generation couldn't give a fig for politics. Instead, Michal sports a Beatles mop-top and runs a local film group specializing in Hollywood and pre-war French films, while Jindřiška starts hanging out with a mysterious hipster. Pelíšky was screened at the 1999 Vancouver Film Festival.
[edit] Musíme si pomáhat (released in English as Divided We Fall)
The film opens in 1939, when some Jews are afraid of the Nazis. Horst, who is married to a German woman and collaborates with the Nazis, brings food to a nice childless couple, the invalid Josef and Marie. Josef hates the Nazis. Josef finds David, who has escaped the concentration camp. Josef and Marie hide him in their apartment. Horst makes an unannounced visit, bringing presents as usual. Marie is ambivalent about their secret: on one hand she never misses an opportunity to blame her husband for bringing in the Jew, but on the other hand she is merciful and sympathetic with the poor kid locked in the closet day and night. She suggests that Josef accepts Horst's job offer, so as to get more protection and deflect possible suspicions. Josef accepts, and is considered a collaborator by the neighbors (who had tried to give David over to the Nazi authorities, when he first escaped from a concentration camp), while Marie spends the days learning French from David, and getting more and more tender towards him, as if she, the childless mother, had finally found her baby to nurse and protect. Horst's visits become more frequent, and one evening a farce takes place. Josef gets the response: he can't have children. Humiliated, Horst takes revenge on Marie by forcing them to provide lodging for a Nazi officer, who had suffered a heart-attack after two of his young sons had been killed at the front. Marie refuses to accept him on the ground that she is pregnant. But now she has to get pregnant, and Josef proposes that David do it. Marie and David have sex. She does get pregnant, and Horst has to apologize to her. As the Germans are beginning to lose, Horst becomes more human. He is actually a native Czech-German. He saves their lives when the Germans search the street house by house. Finally, the Germans are defeated and the Czech people take brutal revenge on them. Right then Marie has to give birth. Josef runs outside looking for a doctor to help. But everywhere is chaos.
He finally finds the new commander: his old neighbor Franta. But Franta remembers him as a collaborator and orders his arrest. Josef protests his innocence and invites them to check in person at his house, that he risked his life to protect a Jew. They allow him to pick his doctor. In the jails, Josef does not see his doctor but finds Horst, crouched in a corner. Josef risks his life one more time, this time to save the collaborator who saved his life once: Josef tells the partisans that Horst is a doctor. The partisans escort them to Josef's house, driving through the ruins of the city. In another slapstick-style scene, Horst pretends to be a doctor and helps Marie, who is terrified to see Horst acting as the doctor. Now Josef needs to produce the Jew, because the new "revolutionaries" want to kill him for collaboration, but David, scared by the armed men, has run out. The captain of the "revolutionaries" doesn't believe him and is about to shoot him without a trial, but David shows up at the last minute, after Josef's despairing plea: "Let us be human!" The baby is born. Both David and the neighbor Franta go along with Josef's lie about Horst, and let the partisans believe that he is indeed a doctor, thus saving his life. Days later, Josef walks the baby through the devastated streets of his city. In the ruins, we see, round a table all the people nonsensically killed during the previous conflagrafion. An aria from J.S. Bach's St Matthew's Passion (Erbarme dich, mein Gott, God, please have mercy on our frailty!) gives the denoumenent of the film a very powerful ending.
The film seems to argue that oppression under totalitarian regimes, such as Nazism and communism, was so strong that we are in no position to judge what people were forced to do under the circumstances. It is, possibly, the best film by Jan Hřebejk, whose other feature films are somewhat stereotyped renditions of various other traumatic historical periods of Czech modern history. While Hřebejk records details of contemporary life rather convincingly, he is prone to myth-making and his analysis of, for instance, the reform period of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia (Pelíšky, Cosy Dens) is totally ahistorical. Czech popular audiences love his films, nevertheless. Kráska v nesnázích (Beauty in Need) was voted the best film of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 2006 by the audiences.)
[edit] Pupendo
Pupendo shows the difficulty of life in Czechoslovakia during the 1980s. Artist Bedřich Mára (Bolek Polivka) is unable to find much secure work due to his public antagonism toward the ruling Communist Party. He has a wife and two children. Life begins to change when art historian Alois Fábera (Jiři Pecha) begins working on a piece about Bedřich, leading to a job offer from a Party official. Things are looking up, until the wrong people hear portions of the historian's writing.
