2024-09-21 19:17:29
CTK
Updated 19. 9. 2024 20:41
The war film Krajan by a pair of directors from the Miroslav Ondříček Film Academy in Písek won one of this year’s student Oscars. This was stated by the American Academy, for whose favor the Czechs competed alongside works from hundreds of art schools around the world. Now they can also strive for awards in the main Oscar competition.
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The film Krajan won the prize for the best film under 30 at the Fofr student cinematography festival in Prague. Photo: Festival Fofr | Video: Fofr
The American organizers will welcome the laureates of the four student award categories at a ceremony that will take place on October 14 in London. They announced their names this Tuesday, the website Echo24 pointed out.
The twenty-five-minute drama Krajan by Pavel Sýkora and Viktor Horák is among the three winners of the category for narrative films. “It portrays the meeting of two men at a cottage cut off from civilization on New Year’s Eve 1944. At first glance, the widower and the SS officer have nothing in common. The only thing they have in common is their Sudeten origins. At first they start talking about everyday topics and as midnight approaches they start to solve more pressing questions,” the director of the Písek Academy, Vladana Terčová, summarizes the story.
The main roles were played by Jiří Štěpnička and Pavel Batěk, who plays an SS officer. The secondary character of the driver was played by Martin Hlubocký. The work was produced by Miloň Terč from the Písek Academy. Krajan premiered in March at Prague’s Dlabačov cinema.
The victory of the students is a huge satisfaction and success for the school, says Vladana Terčová. He appreciates that the creators got advice from educators during the preparation. According to her, it was thanks to the intervention of the teachers, who consult the films with the students from the script to the final version of the cut, that some changes were made in the production process.
“There are students who don’t want to talk about it, which we respect, but then they often find out that they made a mistake. So it’s good that these students talked about it, and we were pleased that they called the teachers themselves afterwards and thanked them for their advice,” states Terčová. He considers success as satisfaction for the school. “We are still in shock and we can’t believe that it was possible, because the competition is huge,” he adds.
Sýkor and Horák thus followed up with Dceru, an animated film by Prague FAMU student Darja Kaščeeva, which received the same award in 2019. Other Czech successes in 2017 and 1989 were the films Who’s Who in Mycology by Marie Dvořáková and Ropáci by Jan Svěrák.
The awards, known in English as the Student Academy Awards, have been awarded by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1972. The winners gain the right to seek Oscars in one of the categories of short animated film, short feature film or short documentary. Holders of student awards from previous years accumulated 67 nominations and 15 awards in the main competition.
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