The Ferrari Dino Girl

“The Ferrari Dino Girl is a film in which a reflection on the past unfolds in the present. Its focal point is 480 meters of film stock on which the past is recorded and can speak for itself. Another “medium” that conveys the past to us, albeit in a much more distorted way, is Jan Němec himself. His film then serves as a platform where the past and the present meet. Just as in, for example, The Landscape of My Heart or In the Name of Code Ruby, major historical events and small, intimate experiences are combined here. In Holka Ferrari Dino, their common denominator is precisely film—film as a tangible artifact that serves as the most reliable “memory,” and film as an essential part of Němec’s life."

Jan Bernard

In this film, Jan Němec describes the circumstances surrounding his filming of the Soviet invasion in the streets of Prague on August 21, 1968. The four reels of valuable footage, shot on his own initiative, were worthless in the occupied country: they had to be shown to the world. The director, along with two friends, smuggled the precious footage—comprising sixteen minutes of unedited material—into Austria across the virtually closed border under highly bizarre circumstances. The most important of these were “the Ferrari Dino girl”—that is, the beautiful but unattainable girl Jana—and the author’s beloved Fiat 850. Jan Němec once again examines the reality of his life in relation to the Czech past. Intimate history is inextricably intertwined with “big” history. The filmmaker juxtaposes re-enacted scenes (in which he is portrayed by Karel Roden) with the original footage that took the world by storm more than forty years ago and garnered “more viewers than Steven Spielberg has.”