Into the Clouds We Gaze Directed by: Written by: Director of Photography: Editing: Story editors: Produced by: time: Martin Dušek Martin Dušek, Josef Krajbich Lukáš Milota Josef Krajbich Karolina Zalabáková, Richard Komárek Kamila Zlatušková Creative Production GroupRunning 66 minutes FULL HD, HDCAM, Dolby E-5.0, English subtitles 2014
Synopsis A gentle love story from the harsh environment of northern Bohemia. Women pass through Ráďa s life as quickly as tuning meets. The only constant is his Ford Escort, which isn t exactly in best shape but means everything to him. Ráďa s miniature world on wheels is lined in white plush, illuminated by green diodes, and loaded with a roaring exhaust. But when he leaves this small world, he runs up against harsh reality and his own limitations. A life with a goal is a life with meaning. But what if your only inner motor is a dilapidated Ford Escort that arouses more bemused looks than admiration at tuning meets? What meaning can a car have for a person? For Ráďa, a lot. He counts every penny and any kind of work is an annoyance. He explores new opportunities, but always with the same result: no sense of fulfillment. The only psychological anchor that he can rely on is a piece of metal and the dream that his car might be something more. He prefers to go hungry than to not have money for gas. His relationship to his car possesses a certain amount of masochistic perversion. Not that he isn t attracted to women. Quite the opposite. In the film, he moves from one relationship to another. The settings, places, and dialogues are almost identical, but the characters change. This, too, is a sign of emptiness. Stagnation. Nowhere to go. Nothing to aim for. The only thing that he feels good at is a far-out light show, though only for a lack of money. Ráďa can t afford to fix the engine, chassis, paint or other accessories. A strip of LED diodes is affordable and visually effective, plus the darkness hides any imperfections on his car and the even greater imperfections in his life. Working with an unusually economical and yet cinematically interesting style, Martin Dušek s film perfectly captures the sense of alienation of a forgotten generation of young people not only in northern Bohemia but throughout Europe today.
Into the Clouds We Gaze Interview with director Martin Dušek What inspired you to make a documentary about the tuning scene? More than 10 years ago, I was driving my Volvo 480 with pop-up headlights in northern Bohemia and was passed by a tuned-up Škoda 120 that someone had apparently tried to turn into the Toyota Supra from The Fast and the Furious. After racing each other along the country roads for a while, I got into a conversation with the driver. He loved the movie, and that car was his entire life. His steering wheel was welded together from gold chains. I was fascinated by the way in which you could use a car to tune up your life. But it wasn t until the summer of 2011 that my editor Pepa Krajbich and I set out to visit a tuning meet in the region where I had originally encountered that Škoda. The meet was fittingly called The Mimoň Wars. I was fascinated by the visually powerful atmosphere: more or less well-done but always bizarre modifications to cars, various types of participants, and diverse forms of entertainment: contests for the loudest sound system, burning out tires by spinning the car s wheels, and striptease shows (both professionals and volunteers from the crowd). A world of empty entertainment, focused on sex and automotive fetishes. We shot our first trailer there. It was an incredible setting, but we didn t meet anyone about whom I wanted to shoot a film. So where did you meet Ráďa, and what attracted you to him? We met Ráďa in 2012 during a meet at the Příbram airfield. Compared to the souped-up cars and self-confident guys surrounded by tawdry girls, Ráďa s club looked pretty pathetic: Golfs, Escorts and Civics pasted together more or less with masking tape, beer in plastic bottles, bottles of melon-flavored vodka, and among them the last of the last-place winners, Ráďa. But in this whole atmosphere, Ráďa and his club struck us as the most human and friendly. It was clear that, for Ráďa, tuning wasn t just an eccentric hobby, but something very fundamental. In him, I could feel that same desire for something better and more perfect than an ordinary life that I d sensed from that guy with his Škoda. One difference was that Ráďa s Escort was in a far worse state of repair though only until he switched on the fluorescent lights and LEDs hidden on the vehicle s inside and outside. His Escort really comes to life during the nighttime tunings, when you can t really see it. Over the next year, Ráďa s club fell apart, apparently because of some petty argument about the club s BBQ or because Ráďa didn t get enough respect from his members. But I didn t mind. I began to be fascinated by the mere existence of Ráďa Pešek his inability to find and hold on to a job, to somehow be a part of the society around him, his boredom from everyday life, from which he escaped twice a year by participating in a tuning meet, the vain attempts of someone who didn t vote (because he didn t know how and politicians just suck money from people like him ) to be able to decide about something, to have at least some power by being the president of his club. I decided to frame the film as a study of Ráďa s life and of one tuning season. The film feels a little like an ethnographic study of northern Bohemia. Did you want to capture some kind of north Bohemian atmosphere? Originally, we had identified several characters who weren t from northern Bohemia, but in the end I ended up five kilometers away in Teplice. Northern Bohemia is a kind of documentary laboratory where everything is in a more focused and inspiring form. It is an exciting tension of layers the prewar society and that of the newcomers exist in a dynamic conflict that is expressed on many different levels social and aesthetic. The way the countryside, the cities, and the individual houses look; and as a result, how the people dress and behave. In my view, Ráďa s story captures the universal feelings of young people on the margins of society unclassifiable young people with no future; a kind of lost European generation. And you can find people like that not just in northern Bohemia. Someone like Ráďa can be found on the other side of the Ore Mountains. In Pirna, for instance. Or also some places in Spain or Ireland.
Did your films protagonists surprise you in any way? I was really surprised by how they responded to the presence of the camera not much at all! It was a big production: a good camera, lenses, assistant cameramen, sound, and a crane, but Ráďa, Verča, and Inka didn t make a big deal out of it. Maybe it s because people are used to constantly filming themselves with their phones. I don t know. Ráďa even tried to cancel a filming day when the caravan of television trucks was already on the way from Brno to Teplice because he had a meeting with someone at Benešák Lake. That lack of respect for the entire concept of filming was great in that he never had stage fright and didn t try to be something he wasn t. It s like we weren t even there. Which in a way is a documentary dream. In your films, you often appear in front of the camera. Why did you remain in the background this time? Every film, subject, or idea needs a different approach. When I start to work on something, I approach it a bit like a detective: I ask myself, what the hell is it really about, and then I work on the basis of that. Sometimes I appear in full force with a commando team, and sometimes I try to by invisible in order to find it and show it. This time, I preferred to be by the monitor and to leave the stage free for Ráďa and the others. The whole thing is too fragile for an egomaniac moderator to appear in front of the camera in his own folk costume.
Statement by creative producer Kamila Zlatušková I am glad that Czech Television s Brno studio can be the exclusive producer of another documentary film that will be capable of holding its own against large co-productions in prestigious domestic and international competitions. This film set among Czech tuning meets took a long time to make and was shot under difficult circumstances. However, the crew s efforts were worth it. I am extremely curious about the audience reaction. For those familiar with the work of Martin Dušek, I should add that they can look forward to a new film that is unlike anything else he has made before.
Kamila Zlatušková Creative Production Group Kamila Zlatušková Creative Production Group was created in 2012. During its brief existence, the group has produced numerous documentary and fiction films, many of which have received awards at domestic and foreign festivals. These include Juraj Lehotský s Miracle (e.g., 38th Toronto Film Festival, 2013; special mention in the East of the West section at the 48th Karlovy Vary IFF; Golden Atlas at the 2013 Arras Film Festival), Robert Kirchhoff s Normalization (Honorable Mention and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at DOK Leipzig 2013, nominated for best documentary at the 2013 Warsaw IFF, best documentary film in the 2014 Sun in the Net competition, Special Mention in the Crossing Europe Social Awareness category at the 2014 Crossing Europe Linz festival), Bohdan Bláhovec s SHOW! (2013 Czech Film Critics Award, Audience Award at the 2103 Jihlava IDFF, Association of Czech Film Clubs Award at the 27th Finále Plzeň, nominated for the 2013 Czech Lion). The members of the creative group work systematically to discover new formats and to push the boundaries of perception of what is possible in television. https://www.facebook.com/tpskamilyzlatuskove
Martin Dušek Director and screenwriter, born 1978 in Česká Lípa, northern Bohemia. Studied television journalism at Charles University s Faculty of Social Sciences and documentary film at FAMU. His feature-length documentary debut A Town Called Hermitage (Poustevna, das ist Paradies, together with Ondřej Provazník), was named best Czech documentary at the 2007 Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. The film had its international premiere in 2008 at the 31st Göteborg film festival, and was nominated by the Czech film academy for the 2009 European Film Awards. Coal on the Soul (Ženy SHR, with O. Provazník) was nominated for the 2010 Pavel Koutecký Award and for the 2011 Prix Europe television award. It was also shown in competition at the 2011 DocAviv festival in Tel Aviv. For Mein kroj (Czech Television, 2011), Dušek created his own bizarre folk costume in response to the fact that his hometown doesn t have any folk tradition of its own. Wearing this costume, he then set out for the Sudeten Days in Augsburg, where he caught the participants attention and was eventually thrown out by the organizers. BBC World Service Radio called the film an immensely entertaining documentary that is also a serious search for identity in Central Europe. In The Resounded Village (Rozezlení, Czech Television, 2013), he offered a portrait of the descendents of those who survived the Nazis destruction of the town of Lidice near Prague. The film captures the tragicomic dispute over different approaches to honoring the dead that was unleashed by several alternative artists and by tragedy s abuse by locals and politicians. In 2011, Dušek s screenplay for the feature-length musical Gaston was selected for prestigious Nipkow Programm in Berlin (a project supported by Media Desk), where Dušek received a six-month residency and intensive dramaturgical training through a specialized workshop. In the feature-length project for Czech Television The Analogs (Parta Analog), Dušek put together a group of 90-year-old television matadors and gave them a chance to produce what would probably be their last television show ever. The resulting film is a loose paraphrasing of modern television formats. Dušek and his own crew recorded preparations for the show and put together a portrait about television and television culture, showing the illusions and dilemmas associated with working in television in general and under totalitarianism in particular. The film was shown in competition at 2014 Finále Plzeň and also received the Václav Táborský Award for best documentary film by a filmmaker under 35. In the cinematically conceived feature-length documentary Into the Clouds We Gaze (K oblakům vzhlížíme, 2014), Dušek follows a group of young unemployed people from northern Bohemia and their attempts at escaping a life limited by a lack of education, the place where they live, and their family background through car tuning i.e., fixing up old cars. The film will have its world premiere in the documentary competition at the 2014 Karlovy Vary IFF.