Jana Boková

Jana Boková has spent her entire life moving between continents, cultures, and homes—and has thus successfully eluded any attempt to describe her life and work. If we wish to capture any of it, we must follow the movement of both her films and her ideas. 

While studying art history at the university in Prague, she decided she would not return to the newly occupied country. This May, she is returning to Prague after many years. Although she shot the film Bye Bye Shanghai here in 2008, in which she explored the theme of exile, Prague is now more of a foreign territory to her, even though she still has a few friends here. She has spent more time in Paris, London, Buenos Aires, and on numerous journeys than in Prague—journeys on which she sought not new homes, but people and themes with whom she could communicate through the language of film and attempt to answer the fundamental questions of human existence. 

Jana Boková graduated as a director from the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, and even her earliest films were marked by a distinctive style. She worked for the BBC during a time when she could apply her authorial approach there. The choice of themes, the selection of characters and locations, narrative perspectives, visual style—all of these were her decisions, for which she was able to find the right collaborators.

In addition to a variety of documentary films, she has directed two feature-length fiction films: Hôtel du Paradis in Paris and Diario para un cuento in Buenos Aires.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether we label her films as fiction or documentary, because their common denominator is lofty: it is a search for the essence, accompanied by a sense of humor, irony, and paradox as fundamental ingredients of the human experience.

Jana Boková has reached high and far with her films: to stars like Fernando Rey, Anthony Quinn, and Eric Clapton; to the streets of Havana and Dallas; she has created portraits of cities like Mexico City and Avignon; her film competed at Cannes; and the Cinémathèque française organized a retrospective of her work.

At Ponrepo and Atlas this year, Jana Boková will present only a small selection of her work, but her body of work will be accessible to future generations, as she recently donated the film reels containing her films to the Narodni filmovy archiv.

Michal Bregant