Krajinka
Slovak Republic,
2000, 110 min
Shown in 2001
CREDITS
- dir
-
Martin Sulik
- prod
-
Rudolf Biermann
- scr
-
Dusan Dusek, Martin Sulik
- cam
-
Martin Strba
- editor
-
Dusan Milko
- mus
-
Vladimir Godar
- cast
-
Juraj Paulen, Ivan Gontko, Jana Segesova, Anton Vaculik
- source
-
Charlie’s LTD., Spitálska 4, 811 01 Bratislava, Slovakia. FAX: 421-7-323-678
OTHER
Like an inset in an atlas, a village is enlarged for our observation and sometime amusement, only to return in the end to its fate as a spot on the landscape “that never was and never will be.” In ten episodes covering the better part of a century, we meet the denizens of a town that time seems to pass through and forget. Director Martin Sulik’s beautifully crafted film harks back to the Czech cinema’s heyday of the ’60s. But it is more fanciful and bizarre in its stories of people who are inexplicably star-crossed, like the oaf called Wild Sibert, who can’t seem to get his head screwed on right, figuratively and literally. The innocence of a soldier seduced by a clockmaker’s widow gives way to a story of not-so-innocent little boys who welcome the shifting occupational forces of war. As the mercurial loyalties of the postwar era stir the town, a tailor’s fate is sewn up by the biting humor for which he was previously renowned. And when the town’s Jewish doctor comes back as a ghost, at least one soul is shaken. The stories are never ending, and yet a world has disappeared, the past a flicker in the too-short present.
—Judy Bloch
FACTOID #130
Spike Lee has attended the San Francisco International several times. He came, film reels in hand, for the world premiere of She’s Gotta Have It in 1986. He returned in 1994 with Crooklyn, which starred Oakland’s own Delroy Lindo. And in 2007 he received the Festival’s Film Society Directing Award.
