Ján Boleslav Kladivo

Slovak director Zuzana Piussi examines her fellow countrymen’s current notions of nationality. She expresses her concern that Slovak national sentiment is rather fragile and liable to political misuse. The protagonists often reject the leading Czech figures of Czechoslovak history and prefer to look for their roots in the common “pre-national“ past of Great Moravia. Although many of the stories are rather tragicomic, the turbulent developments in the EU have shown that the search for one’s own identity is a sensitive matter not only in Slovakia.

In this partly autobiographical documentary, the director traces the history of Generation 90, a group of Slovak filmmakers who studied in the 1990s. Kuboš conducts interviews with his contemporaries, including Jaroslav Vojtek, Peter Kerekes, and Zuzana Piussi, which he intersperses with their work, while at the same time placing both in a broader cultural and political history. A playfulness and respect for documentary film as such shines through the film.