Documentary Mondays, Fiction Tuesdays at Czech Center in Bucharest

The programs Documentary Mondays and Fiction Tuesdays return at the Czech Center in Bucharest between May 13 and June 4, on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Four films are part of the Documentary Mondays program, where the directors will take part in online Q&A sessions with the public.

Apolena Rychlíková’s Limits of Europe, which follows the Czech journalist Saša Uhlová’s foray into the world of unskilled workers from Central and Eastern Europe who work abroad, is scheduled for May 13. Lucie Králová’s Kapr Code, a documentary-opera on the life and work of Czech composer Jan Kapr, will be screened on May 20.

Czech film director Jan Švankmajer, who turns 90 this year, will be celebrated with a documentary about him and a fiction film he made. As such, the public can watch Jan Danhel and Adam Olha Athanor: The Alchemical Furnace on May 27. The film is described as a playful portrait that captures Švankmajer in various moments and situations, as well as his views on food, fetishes, or the end of humanity and Western civilization.

Documentary Mondays ends on June 3 with Theo Montoya’s Anhell69, which follows a young director as he tells his story in Medellin, a city marked by conflict, violence, and paradoxes. The cast consisted of queer youth from Medellin, but the lead actor dies of an overdose at the age of 21.

Meanwhile, Fiction Tuesdays opens at the I.L. Caragiale National University of Theater and Film on May 14 with František Vláčil’s Markéta Lazarová, the acclaimed epic considered an essential film for all cinema lovers.

On May 21, the Czech Center hosts the screening of Jan Švankmajer’s Alice, a tribute to the imagination of Lewis Carroll and a dive into the author’s childhood in an attempt to revive the experience of the young age.

Tomás Vorel’s The Smoke, the “musical of the totalitarian era,” is scheduled for May 28, while Otakar Vávra’s Krakatit, an adaptation of Karel Čapek’s novel of the same name, ends the Fiction Tuesdays program on June 4.

Access to the screenings is free. The films are screened with English subtitles. The screenings start at 20:00; access starts at 19:45.

(Photo: still from The Limits of Europe, courtesy of the Czech Center)