Remembering

Are you happy? What is happiness? What are the important things in life? Ivan Vojnár asks these questions as he moves through the streets of Prague with his camera in March 2006, and the dozens of responses he receives form the unique space of his Remembering. One response went: What bothers me about the Czechs is their pettiness, their unwillingness to acknowledge that someone who does well in something does so became they were able to, they were capable, we don't have our own opinion, and us Czechs, that isn't our opinion, that's the opinion of other countries. And another: We're contented, for Czechs that means that they're relaxed, not much going on in the local backwaters, politics? - I don't know, everything continues to be pretty much that they can talk about stuff but they don't have to do much about it. _ The director revives the method of the film-survey to record the feelings and ideas of Czechs seventeen years after the political and cultural turning point of the revolution. The momentary and random character of the filming made it possible to capture the moment, identify the line between constancy and change in national time. _ The significance of the survey is its ability to record the specific determinants of a particular state of the world in which a mass of comments produces a set of responses that ring true. _ Like Jan Špáta or the French directors Chris Marker and Luis Malle, Vojnár charts the echoes of the lives of people from diverse social and educational backgrounds and of different ages. The lives of passers-by are condensed into several seconds or minutes within the film. This is the only way to detect the pulse of society.