Swiss sales agent Lightdox has added competition titles “Kapr Code” by Lucie Králová and “Garçonnières” by Céline Pernet to its lineup at international doc festival Visions du Réel, which runs April 7-17 in Nyon, Switzerland.
Competing in the Burning Lights category, “Kapr Code” is described as a “documentary opera” that traces the life of controversial avant-garde Czech composer Jan Kapr (1914-1988), a Stalin Award laureate who was later banned in communist Czechoslovakia and erased from public memory.
Director Lucie Králová transfers the composer’s life into musical composition, playfully mixing modern opera songs with Kapr’s never-before-seen private archive, revealing his humor, inner struggles and desire to be remembered.
“We faced the question of how to translate Kapr’s story into film while keeping its complexity, ambivalence and strength, and still reflect the unknown ‘holes’ or ‘blind spots’ in memory,” said Králová.
“We reconstructed Kapr’s story from the fragments of memory we found. Kapr actually re-created his story with us, as he is the author of 8mm footage, letters, music, but also his own life-story, which we follow in the opera songs. In this way, Kapr composes his life thus co-creating this documentary,” she said.
In “Garçonnières,” which features in VdR’s National Competition, director and anthropologist Céline Pernet explores her relationship with the men of her generation.
The filmmaker explains how the idea for her doc came after three years of Tinder dating that included 476 matches, 65 dates and some 15 flings.
“There were a lot of encounters with strangers, and once the usual banalities had been exhausted, I had taken the habit of asking these men what it was like to be a man. I was struck by the spontaneity and sincerity with which the men spoke to me: I had opened a breach, a direct access to the male psyche. I needed to know more,” she explains.
Pernet posted a newspaper ad and found 30 men aged between 30 and 45 who were willing to talk to her about seduction, sex, couples, love and paternity.
“What started as an innocent game on the tortuous path of my love life became in a few weeks the genesis of a real documentary investigation in the heart of our intimate relationships, reflecting an urgent need to discuss current models of masculinity.”
Lightdox co-founder and CEO Anna Berthollet said: “All the films we embrace have transformative storytelling in common, and ‘Garçonnières,’ which captures the zeitgeist of the 21st century’s understanding of masculinity with precision and humor, is no exception.”
Of “Kapr Code,” Berthollet said: “[It] is a feature film that breaks barriers of form and genre and dramatically transforms a story into a unique experience. We feel very privileged to continue working with talented directors with vision and drive and to defend thrilling, unique pieces of documentary art.”
In addition to “Kapr Code” and “Garçonnières,” Lightdox is also presenting Nikolay Stefanov’s debut feature doc “No Place for You in Our Town” in the Latitudes sidebar at VdR.
The story of a group of soccer hooligans in a Bulgarian mining town whose industry has slowly decayed since the fall of the Soviet Union, “No Place for You in Our Town” premiered at CPH:DOX and was recently boarded by HBO Max. It marks the streamer’s first original from Bulgaria and will drop in fall 2022.
