Synopsis
Honza was born in 1974 into the cheerless era of socialism in Czechoslovakia. At that time, his parents Jana and Petr lived in one room in the apartment of Jana’s divorced mother and her widowed grandmother. A few years later, the family moved from Prague to Liberec where Petr found a job and a little house for the family. When Honza was born, his father began writing a family chronicle and he has continued to do so for 37 years. Private Universe shows not only the life of one ordinary family but also how Czech society has changed over the course of those four decades.
A word from Tënk
Private Universe has all the trappings of the fulfillment of Helena Třeštíková's trajectory, of her protracted filmmaking approach, this time spanning almost four decades and including three generations of the same siblings. She makes her cinematography more complex by integrating fragments of the father's diary into the editing process and is distinguished here by the multiplicity of regimes, revealing the movements of history with newsreels scattered throughout a series of sequences that is - as always - dense and gripping. This layout addresses the way in which lives are written, through encounters between fate and chance, individual and collective, events large and small, down below and up above - not just the site where the Soviet space exploits took place that fascinated Honza as a child. Like Diderot's Jacques, The Fatalist, we might ask: "And who made the great scroll where everything is written?"
Arnaud Hée
Programmer, teacher and critic
