2024-09-26 12:20:26
According to director Viktor Tauš, the film Amerikánka, which cinemas will start screening this coming Thursday, will take the audience into a world of emotions that they are not used to seeing in cinemas today.
The film, inspired by real events from the bleak environment of a children’s home, is a continuation of the theater production of the same name presented in 2018 in the Jatka78 space in Holešovice. The theater tells the story of eight years of the life of a girl nicknamed American, the film follows her for four decades. The main heroine in the film is played by three actresses Klára Kitto, Julie Šoucová and Pavla Beretová. At the time of filming, they were nine, 17 and 38 years old.
“I think the film will hit the audience primarily with its main character. The American girl is a girl I’ve been relating to for twenty-five years when I’m in trouble or at a loss. She’s incredible in the way she can overcome anything that life puts in front of her, while maintaining humor and kindness towards other people,” says director, screenwriter and producer of the project Viktor Tauš.
He named the American after a girl he met when they were both on the edge of society. “I first wrote about her in my diary in May 2000, when we were living on the street. She told me her story, which touched me so much that I began to yearn to understand her nature, to understand what gives her so much strength. Since then, I’ve been dealing with the story and I also knew that I had nothing to do on that street anymore,” adds Tauš.
The current film was foreshadowed last year again at Jatká78 by the Snowflakes theatrical production. The main character was played by Pavla Beretová together with Lucía Žáčková. The performance, with elements of a musical, a drama and a fashion show, was a kind of live trailer for a feature film.
“All the actors from this production will also be seen in the film, led by the courage of the children, whom I had the wonderful opportunity to meet. American Girl is about those children and belongs to them. We managed to bring together about fifty incredible children from orphanages and elsewhere from all social strata, for whom it was important to be together and tell the world what was in them,” Tauš looks back.
Amerikanka is Tauša’s first feature film after a nine-year hiatus. | Photo: Honza Mudra
The film tells the story in an unconventional stylized language, there is not a single realistic scene in it. The children play the characters of real abandoned children, and since they themselves are mainly from children’s homes, according to Tauš, they imbue the stories of their characters with their own destinies.
“Several times alternate in the film, but they are very distinct in color and orientation in the plot is extremely simple,” he thinks.
“From my point of view, it’s like a kaleidoscope of the main character’s memories. All the worlds and images in it are shaped only by emotion. We’re not descriptive, we don’t show how the devices looked then and how they look today, but we convey the emotion of the children. At the moment when if you decide to do so, in terms of emotions you will experience something that you have not been able to experience in the cinema in your life,” believes the director.
Viktor Tauš graduated from the Secondary School of Communication Technology in Prague. He interrupted his studies at FAMU due to drug addiction. His first feature film was the autobiographical Canary. “It is the story of a boy who loses his sense of reality because of his love for an American film and tries to find his world in the streets of Prague. And that can’t turn out well,” said the author years ago about his first film, in which he played the main role. He came from his own experience – he took heroin for two years and received treatment for the next six months.
In addition to Kanárek, Tauš impressed with the nostalgic comedy Sněženky a machři after 25 years, which was followed by Karel Smyczko’s pre-revolutionary film Sněženky a machři, or the film Clowns. The continuation of Snow Whites and Machrů was a success with the audience, Clowns with the duo Oldřich Kaiser and Jiří Lábus was mainly appreciated by critics. In recent years, Tauš filmed the dark or criminal miniseries Blue Shadows, Waterman or Traitors.
Video: Trailer from the movie American Girl
The movie Americana will start showing in cinemas this coming Thursday. Photo: Martin Douba | Video: Bioscop