2024-02-18 22:11:55
The new film by director Apolena Rychlíková called Hranice Europa was selected for the international documentary film festival CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, Denmark, where it will have its world premiere on March 14. The film, in which the journalist Saša Uhlová becomes cheap labor in Western Europe for several months, will then go to the main competition at the Geneva Festival and Human Rights Forum.
“I am very happy that a film with such a challenging topic caught the attention of foreign selectors,” says Rychlíková. “It is a great honor for me to have the premiere at such a prestigious festival as CPH:DOX. I hope that thanks to our project, the topic of cheap migrant labor will be able to reach wider European awareness. This is also because the West and the East are divided by wage iron curtain,” he adds.
Some time ago, the festival presented, among other things, the time-lapse documentary René by Helena Třeštíková or the title Občan Havel by directors Pavel Koutecký and Miroslav Janek.
In the new Hranice Evropy, the journalist Uhlová leaves her family and, together with millions of other Eastern European workers, becomes cheap labor in Western Europe. In Germany on a farm, in an Irish hotel or as a carer in France. Everywhere, they experience first-hand the fates of those whose work we need and exploit on a daily basis, the creators say.
They ask what is the real price that Europe pays for ill-conceived labor migration, and what are the fates and motivations of those who carry it out.
Uhlová, who comes from the dissident family of Petr Uhl and former ombudsman Anna Šabatová, won the Ferdinand Peroutka Prize for 2023 this year. She is currently the editor of the internet journal A2larm.
Apolena Rychlíková is a director of documentary films and a journalist. She was the editor of the A2larm server for years. Now she works as a freelance journalist. In his work, he deals with issues of gender equality, housing availability, foreclosures and other topics of social justice. Her father is director, actor and civic activist Břetislav Rychlík.