Kovy řeší dějiny

Set history free. A modern history, enclosed for more than a quarter of a century in an abandoned prison in Uherské Hradiště with unique rooms preserved from the 1950s. The authors fill the emptiness of the premises with situational encounters with the building, nature and people who are united by their experience of the place and who are often divided by their life experience. A shared past as a starting point to a shared future.

The documentary provides an insight into the life and work of one of the Czech Republic's most experienced war reporters, Martin Dorazín.

Activism, direct observation, and situational documentary inconspicuously linger about the constantly delayed construction of the D8 motorway. Local residents, a Brno-based activist and the construction chief shatter the clichés of contemporary documentary film - among other things in who we should root for. The local mixes with the global just like economics and the environment.

This documentary takes us to Zambia, a country with significant copper reserves. The state used to mine and sell copper itself. Then its price fell and the mines were forced to privatize in favor of Western multinational companies. While the proceeds used to finance schools, healthcare, and infrastructure, today all the money leaves the country, including generous subsidies from the European Investment Bank. Czech documentary filmmaker Ivo Bystřičan and cameraman Jiří Málek come to see what the situation, which seems to be taken straight out of the daily news in the Western world, really looks like. We are used to looking at the so-called Third World through the eyes of passionate activists fighting poverty and all kinds of humanitarian organizations. The Copper Age, on the other hand, soberly shows that we should be more interested in what this "selfless" aid looks like in practice.

This documentary film, which is based on the field-recording research method, gives space to the physical places where important energy, natural, and political processes take place. The director, musicians Václav Havelka and Pan Throrarensen, philosopher Lukáš Likavčan, and field-recordists Sara Pinheiro and Magnús Bergson all ask the question: “What are sounds that we don’t attach any importance to in our everyday lives trying to tell us and how can they predict the sequence of events that affects our lives?” Here, sound becomes a tool that can oftentimes capture geological time better than an image.