Opening Program
The Pragueshorts Film Festival celebrates its twentieth birthday this year, and in those two decades it has brought nearly 2,000 short films to Czech cinemas.
For this year’s anniversary edition, the programming team has put together an opening program that looks back on the festival’s twenty-year-history in a retro style. Many of the films we considered have not withstood the test of time: their themes are no longer relevant, their methods have aged, and there are some things we no longer make fun of today. Our careful filtering process has nevertheless come up with seven films with no expiration date – films that have, in fact, ripened with time. You may even remember some of them from previous opening-night programs.
Ivan Zachariáš’s Bollywood-style musical Mulit, made for Absolut Vodka, is as enchanting today as it was at the festival’s premiere edition, and the titular lovestruck hairdresser is sure to stay in your hearts for another twenty years to come. A few years later, the world of short film was entranced by the surprising single-shot reconstruction of a failed bank robbery: Incident by a Bank earned its director a Golden Bear at the Berlinale, and the name Ruben Östlund has remained in the sights of the world’s leading festivals ever since. Don Hertzfeldt’s endearing and spirited animated sci-fi short World of Tomorrow first saw the light of day more than ten years ago, but its vision of the future hasn’t aged a day. Viktor Hertz’s spot-on Swedish comedy How it Feels to be Hungover remains one of the best party films, just as it was at the festival’s 19th edition. And only a few films have been such a festival hit and crowd favorite as Yves Piat’s Tunisian-French Nefta Football Club, the story of the creative use of smuggled white powder during a youth sporting event. Director Jan Saska’s Hurikán, an animated odyssey about love, thirst, and Žižkov which was named Best Short Film at the Czech Film Critics’ Awards and won an Audience Award at Pragueshorts, has truly earned the right to be called a “hit.” And we close the evening the same way we began, with a musical: Gustav Egerstedt’s Live Forever, which made a splash at our festival’s Brutal Relax Show, is an homage to genre film and to all the characters you won’t see in the sequel.
More films from past festivals can be found online at KVIFF.TV after 1 March.
English spoken or English subtitled screening. Suitable both for English speaking viewers and Czech viewers alike.
