Jana Ševčíková

At his parsonage over the Tatra Mountains, Marian Kuffa readily takes care of more than 200 people in need. This unostentatious movie is not just a portrait of a remarkably selfless man but also a more general contemplation of the complicated lives of alcoholics, junkies, and all other social outcasts, as well as an elegant reflection on mercy and the forms that faith can take.

In 1988, an earthquake killed at least 25.000 people in the Armenian city of Gyumri, a third of them children. Jana Ševčíková explores life after and with the disaster, meets survivors and their children.

Jakub presents an extensive ethnographical-sociological study of the life of the Ruthenians, filmed in the Maramuresh mountains in the north of Romania and in the former Sudetenland in Western Bohemia. The film was made over a period of five years during the time of both totalitarian regimes and was completed in 1992 after the revolution.

An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.

The award-winning Old Believers (2001), made over a period of five years, documents the life of a strongly religious community in the Danube Delta where time seems to stand still.

Jakub, The Old Believers, and Piemule are three documentaries about forgotten people by director Jana Sevciková. All three are distributed on the same DVD under the name Old Believers. Piemule offers a close look at the descendants of Czech immigrants in Romania.

“Try to describe what it's like to see,” one of the blind actors in Jana Ševčíková's documentary urges the film crew. The same challenge for him is to express how reality is perceived and experienced by a visually impaired person. Ševčíková therefore does not explain the blindness. Using everyday situations as examples, she empathetically and without pathos presents the stories of six people who never stop dreaming, yearning, and searching for ways to be as free in life as the sighted majority. They find sources of energy in work, sports, dance, and relationships. We are also transported into their world by the dimly lit black and white camera and the layered soundtrack.