- Occupation
Director - Country
Slovak Republic
Čákanyová Viera
Under Underground
A documentary about the relationship between the life underground and "above ground", about the significance and metamorphoses of the concept of underground. A film from underground. There are still numerous Communist-era civil defence facilities under the city, maintained for a case of emergency. The new administrator of several of them is a biology student. Under the ground, three people tell their stories. One was an underground architect under the Communists, another a filmmaker and the third a singer.
Allah does not wink
Part of the Family Crossroads cycle which was soon after its premier criticized by a conservative internet portal Eurabia.cz for spreading yet another Muslim propaganda on Czech TV. In brief and simple images of households in blocks of flats, it draws portrays of two young Czech women whose lives turned similar ways with their decision to convert to Islam. The film is searching to find out why the women chose Islam and how their surroundings, family and friends reacted to their internal and external transformation.
Children of Stalinism
„CHILDREN OF STALINISM“are those who grew up in 50s in communist Czechoslovakia and experienced the Velvet Revolution. They opened up for the documentaries to give a testimony of the past. The communist regime robbed them of their childhood, they have often never seen one or both of their parents, or not until they came back from the communist prisons. They often ended up in the care of their relatives or in institutional care, at worst. They were labeled “children of the enemy”, or “criminals’ children” and were deprived of opportunities to get higher education, and condemned to live at the margins of the society. They were not guilty of anything, but had to live lives of sinners. This goes like a red thread through all fourteen 26 minutes long parts of “Children of Stalinism” series. The parts of the series are not only testimonies of political prisoners and their families as seen through the eyes of their children, but they also attempt to understand and mediate main protagonists’ life as they live it now and as it was shaped by their difficult past.
Alda
The screenplay for this film is based on the writings of a person suffering from the Alzheimer's disease. The story of Mrs. O. is told through a combination of documentary film footage and her own videos from a hand-held digital camera since she records mini instructions for various daily activities, memories, thoughts and commentaries on various events, trying to prevent forgetting them later in the future. Through the individual story of a gradual memory loss, the film represents a metaphor of the memory loss of the whole society which is trying to forget the past events that determined its current status quo // All rights are with the producer FAMU - Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
100 Days
Life is going on, people work and have children, out of love or out of lack of other motivation in life. As there is no God, the only certitude is 24 hours open Tesco hypermarket. 40 years ago, Apollo 11 landed on the the surface of the Moon. Next destination is Mars. No human project can go on without a hope of being completed in a reasonable time-limit. Maximal reasonable time-limit is the duration of a human life. What does fit into it? Béla, a retired Hungarian bio-molecular scientist is waiting for death. In the meantime, he has some things to say.
Piranha
The portrait of a sensationalist journalist who specialised in "real crime stories" – murder, suicide, harrassment and similar themes. The film is about media and personal manipulation and the effort to uncover what is underneath. – Department of documentary film, FAMU – 2nd year (documentary portrait).
Olda
Having been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and suffered two strokes, Ms. Oldriska lives with her dog in an apartement with a lovely view of Brno. Using a simple digital camera she records a few days of her life – an everyday struggle with body and brain, a visit by her friend and son, the reconstruction of her apartment. With no previous experience filming, she uses the camera in a very spontaneous way, sometimes fighting with the technical limits of the device, sometimes even forgetting about the shooting itself. The film deals with ageing, pain, solitude, and also love, for people and animals, in a very raw and non-aestheticized manner.
Update
One night on the frontier of real and virtual, east and west, documentary and fiction, hapiness and oblivion.
A documentary about the relationship between the life underground and "above ground", about the significance and metamorphoses of the concept of underground. A film from underground. There are still numerous Communist-era civil defence facilities under the city, maintained for a case of emergency. The new administrator of several of them is a biology student. Under the ground, three people tell their stories. One was an underground architect under the Communists, another a filmmaker and the third a singer.
Allah does not wink
Part of the Family Crossroads cycle which was soon after its premier criticized by a conservative internet portal Eurabia.cz for spreading yet another Muslim propaganda on Czech TV. In brief and simple images of households in blocks of flats, it draws portrays of two young Czech women whose lives turned similar ways with their decision to convert to Islam. The film is searching to find out why the women chose Islam and how their surroundings, family and friends reacted to their internal and external transformation.
Children of Stalinism
„CHILDREN OF STALINISM“are those who grew up in 50s in communist Czechoslovakia and experienced the Velvet Revolution. They opened up for the documentaries to give a testimony of the past. The communist regime robbed them of their childhood, they have often never seen one or both of their parents, or not until they came back from the communist prisons. They often ended up in the care of their relatives or in institutional care, at worst. They were labeled “children of the enemy”, or “criminals’ children” and were deprived of opportunities to get higher education, and condemned to live at the margins of the society. They were not guilty of anything, but had to live lives of sinners. This goes like a red thread through all fourteen 26 minutes long parts of “Children of Stalinism” series. The parts of the series are not only testimonies of political prisoners and their families as seen through the eyes of their children, but they also attempt to understand and mediate main protagonists’ life as they live it now and as it was shaped by their difficult past.
Alda
The screenplay for this film is based on the writings of a person suffering from the Alzheimer's disease. The story of Mrs. O. is told through a combination of documentary film footage and her own videos from a hand-held digital camera since she records mini instructions for various daily activities, memories, thoughts and commentaries on various events, trying to prevent forgetting them later in the future. Through the individual story of a gradual memory loss, the film represents a metaphor of the memory loss of the whole society which is trying to forget the past events that determined its current status quo // All rights are with the producer FAMU - Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
100 Days
Life is going on, people work and have children, out of love or out of lack of other motivation in life. As there is no God, the only certitude is 24 hours open Tesco hypermarket. 40 years ago, Apollo 11 landed on the the surface of the Moon. Next destination is Mars. No human project can go on without a hope of being completed in a reasonable time-limit. Maximal reasonable time-limit is the duration of a human life. What does fit into it? Béla, a retired Hungarian bio-molecular scientist is waiting for death. In the meantime, he has some things to say.
Piranha
The portrait of a sensationalist journalist who specialised in "real crime stories" – murder, suicide, harrassment and similar themes. The film is about media and personal manipulation and the effort to uncover what is underneath. – Department of documentary film, FAMU – 2nd year (documentary portrait).
Olda
Having been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and suffered two strokes, Ms. Oldriska lives with her dog in an apartement with a lovely view of Brno. Using a simple digital camera she records a few days of her life – an everyday struggle with body and brain, a visit by her friend and son, the reconstruction of her apartment. With no previous experience filming, she uses the camera in a very spontaneous way, sometimes fighting with the technical limits of the device, sometimes even forgetting about the shooting itself. The film deals with ageing, pain, solitude, and also love, for people and animals, in a very raw and non-aestheticized manner.
Update
One night on the frontier of real and virtual, east and west, documentary and fiction, hapiness and oblivion.
Gottland
Based on stories selected from the bestseller Gottland by Polish author Mariusz Szczygiel, a series of film essays will be made by six FAMU students, describing the Czech national history from the perspective of one who never won. Surrounded by superpowers in its geopolitical space, Czechoslovakia has always had to manoeuvre within the limits set by others (e.g. when fighting for the unwanted Emperor of Austria in World War I, suffering the trauma of the Munich Pact etc.). Unable to decide about their own fate, Czechs had to develop a strategy of constant compromise-seeking behaviour and peaceful solutions, assuming the position of the "absent one", since that was the most advantageous way of defence; minimizing the experience of loss, however, leaving behind a great moral mutilation. In comparison with other nations of the world, nothing much ever happened to Czechs and nothing much ever will.
Based on stories selected from the bestseller Gottland by Polish author Mariusz Szczygiel, a series of film essays will be made by six FAMU students, describing the Czech national history from the perspective of one who never won. Surrounded by superpowers in its geopolitical space, Czechoslovakia has always had to manoeuvre within the limits set by others (e.g. when fighting for the unwanted Emperor of Austria in World War I, suffering the trauma of the Munich Pact etc.). Unable to decide about their own fate, Czechs had to develop a strategy of constant compromise-seeking behaviour and peaceful solutions, assuming the position of the "absent one", since that was the most advantageous way of defence; minimizing the experience of loss, however, leaving behind a great moral mutilation. In comparison with other nations of the world, nothing much ever happened to Czechs and nothing much ever will.
Viera Čakányová was born in 1980 in Bratislava. She studied Academy of Performing Arts (VŠMU) in Bratislava – Department of Scriptwriting. She continued in her film studies later at Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague – Departement of Documentary Film. In her first years of study she made films Under Under Ground (2006), Červi/ Worms (2007) a Piraňa/ Piranha (2007) which were succesfully shown on several international festival of short movies. The latter one was awarded the best documentary on FAMUfest 2007 – annual festival of student films of FAMU. Her last film till the date received award for the best student film at FAMUfest 2009.
Filmography:
Under Under Ground (18´, CZ, 2006)
Piraňa (26´, CZ, 2007)
Červi (CZ, 2007)
Alda (51´, CZ, 2009)
100 dnů (22´, CZ, 2009)
Catalogue of Upcoming Czech Documentary Films - 2012