Late Night Talks with Mother

introduction: Petr Marek

This experimental artistic feature film, with its strongly autobiographical elements, is the work of Jan Němec, the enfant terrible of Czech cinema. Through this film, the director conducts a cinematic-psychoanalytic probe into his own fate. In this sophisticatedly stylized film, which serves as a counterpart to Kafka’s Letter to His Father, the protagonist engages in an urgent debate with his deceased mother in order to obtain her absolution. Her profession as an ophthalmologist becomes one of the key formal motifs of the confession, whose axis is the route from the statue of St. Wenceslas on Wenceslas Square to the crematorium in Strašnice. Although the author’s forced exile temporarily removed him from the places where he lived and through which all the important figures in his life primarily move, this route becomes a metaphorical path of a reconciliation—half intimately painful, half ostentatiously directorial—with his own turbulent life. The film was produced in a 35mm version after winning the Golden Leopard in the video film competition at the 2001 Locarno International Film Festival.

2001 - Locarno International Film Festival: Golden Leopard; Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival: nomination for the main prize in the Czech Documentary Film section
2002 - Jeonju Film Festival: nomination for the Daring Digital Award