CASFFA 2022 AFCA SPECIAL JURY PRIZE WINNER: SAVING ONE WHO WAS DEAD
By Ahlia Karam Congratulations to Saving One Who Was Dead by Václav Kadrnka which has won this year’s Best Film Award at CaSFFA 2022. This stunning film heartbreakingly captures a sense of loss and sadness. Presented in portrait format, the styling of the film is beautiful in its repetition, encapsulating the clinical and uniform setting. […]
Meet CaSFFA 2022 Juror Ahlia Karam
My interest in international film stemmed from the lack of diversity I was seeing in mainstream cinema. Growing up Lebanese Australian in a predominately white society I never felt like I saw anyone who looked like me on screen. I’d go to the cinema with school friends and feel like I was watching representations of […]
Meet CaSFFA 2022 Juror Nadine Whitney
I first came to Czechoslovakian cinema through surrealism. In a cinema studies class at university my tutor took us through the standard fare of the movement (mostly Buñuel and other works that were contemporary to the era). He then showed us some later films including the genius and subversive films of Jan Švankmajer. I was […]
Meet CaSFFA 2022 Juror Peter Krausz
My love of cinema goes back to my childhood when my mother would take me to the cinema every week, mainly for her to learn to speak English. Yet for me it gave me exhilarating experiences that opened up new worlds and ideas. At High School, we were shown films every Friday afternoon, some of […]
AFCA Award for the Best Feature Film at CaSFFA 2018
The following is a transcript of the award speeches delivered at the Closing Night of the 6th Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia on 22 September 2018 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Pictured above: Bear with Us Stuart Richards: This endearing film, about a bickering family spending one final nostalgic night in their […]
Meet CaSFFA juror Zak Hepburn
I first came to Miloš Forman like many others, I suppose. As a young film lover in a small country town growing up, the international cinema offering at the local Civic Video was somewhat lacking, beyond copies of Like Water for Chocolate and Cinema Paradiso. Like all decent VHS rental stores of a certain period, […]
Meet CaSFFA Juror Eloise Ross
In mid-2009, after I finished my Honours thesis and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, a friend and I spent three months backpacking through Europe. We spent most of our time in Eastern Europe, heading southeast from Germany after a week in Russia. When we made it to the Czech Republic, in between tourist activities […]
CaSFFA Film Locations interactive
The Czech and Slovak Film Festival is renowned for going above and beyond its mission of showcasing the finest Czech and Slovak films, whether it be with exhibitions of artworks or even flying in famous organist Pavel Kohout to play a score to a silent film. So it should be no surprise that, when Rail Europe joined […]
Meet CaSFFA Juror Stuart Richards
I have been an educator since 2010 and have only formally become a film critic this year through my work on Triple R’s Plato’s Cave and membership with the Australian Film Critics Association. The prospect of being on the awards jury for the 2018 Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia is in equal parts […]
Linda Studená catches up with Dagmar Bláhová, star of The Apple Game
(Photo: Věra Chytilová and Dagmar Bláhová. Photo courtesy of D. Bláhová.) Tell me about The Apple Game (Hra o Jablko, dir. Věra Chytilová, 1976, Czechoslovakia)… Well the film is now a Czech classic and I use the film in FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) in the Masterclass, […]
First announcement for 2018: Věra Chytilová retrospective
Today’s the first Wednesday of February, which signifies something wonderful for Melbourne’s fanatical cinephile community – it heralds the opening of another glorious year of screenings presented by the Melbourne Cinémathèque! Moreover, every year since CaSFFA’s outset we’ve partnered with the Cinémathèque to present a selection of gems from the Czech and Slovak archives. This […]
Soft diplomacy and the landscape photography of Josef Koudelka
As part of this year’s Czech and Slovak Film Festival there was a panel discussion on the question of how images play a role in soft diplomacy. An instrument of soft power, soft diplomacy specifically entails the use of cultural and symbolic capital to build mutual understanding between parties and promote trust and respect. When […]
The Cat that Didn’t Get the Cream: On Juraj Herz’s Morgiana
In my first blog post for the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia, I mentioned my fondness for Alice in Wonderland, and especially Jan Švankmajer’s 1987 adaptation. How strange it was that I should then find myself in the cinema, watching something which so evoked Alice – and yet, was so distinct from it. […]
AFCA Award for the Best Feature Films at #CaSFFA2017
The following is a transcript of the award speeches delivered at the Closing Night of the 5th Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia on 23 September 2017 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Pictured above: Little Harbour. Faith Everard: Good evening ladies and gentlemen, or should I say “dobrý večer”? Being a member […]
I, Olga Hepnarova
It is a cliché that film biographies attempt to discover the essence of a person – who they were and why they did their noteworthy deeds. This can be a laudable, lofty task. If the subject is the typical “great man” of classic biopics, like Lawrence of Arabia or the titular Aviator, filmmaking can be […]
Facing the demon: Filthy and the spectre of male violence
A Slovak and Czech co-production – like many of this year’s CaSFFA offerings – the festival theme of ‘Neighbours’ takes a dark but important turn in Slovakian director and actor Tereza Nvotová’s startling debut feature Špina. Translated into English as Filthy, this remarkable if harrowing movie goes to the dark heart of male violence against […]
FC Roma
Patrik and Pavel are the central characters in this portrait of Romani life in a small Czech town. As coach and assistant coach of a mainly Romani football team we follow their day-to-day lives in this very open-ended documentary. Racism and sport are in sharp focus in Europe as the continent tries to unite whilst […]
Meet CaSFFA Juror Jaymes Durante
Of the many, oft-justified misconceptions made about critics, the most maddening (and easily debunked) is the idea that we know everything about movies. Though it’s far from accurate, the C word tends to conjure that pervasive cliché: the snooty cultural elitist, out of touch and viewing art on a heightened intellectual plane, flipping through a […]
Everybody Needs Good Neighbours: Meet CaSFFA Juror Stephen A Russell
While it is certainly true that the citizens of our national capital of disputed dual nationality are now blessed with the glorious Czech and Slovak Film Festival (CaSFFA) annually, its spiritual home is, of course, the cinematically obsessed city of Melbourne. It’s a movie-mad metropolis that I, myself a dual national (though, to the best […]
The Shop on Main Street
The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, aka The Shop on High Street) is a wonderful example of a cinema of neighbours, representing the powerful beauty that can be drawn forth by diverse groups joining together in artistic collaboration. Co-directed by long-time collaborators Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos (with assistant directing by Juraj Herz, […]
Meet CaSFFA Juror Faith Everard
I recall fondly the first Czechoslovak film I ever saw – René Laloux’s French/Czechoslovak hybrid Fantastic Planet (1973, pictured above). It was a film I’d been itching to see ever since I stumbled across its enigmatic original trailer. An animated feature set on a distant planet, the film quickly seduced me with its crisp visuals […]
Czech and Slovak Films
Growing up in and around Sydney in the 1950s I knew nothing about films other than those made in English until around 1955 when I joined a film society that had screenings of foreign language films in a decrepit room above the Plaza Cinema (now defunct) in George Street, Sydney. One of the first films […]
First Announcement for 2017: Juraj Herz Retrospective
In what is now a well established CaSFFA tradition, it brings us great pleasure to be able to make our first program announcements for our next springtime festival even before the first month of the new year is over! For every year since our outset we’ve partnered with the Melbourne Cinémathèque to present a selection […]
Letter from Humphrey McQueen to Peter Lyssiotis
Esteemed Australian historian and author Humphrey McQueen recently attended the Czech and Slovak Film Festival when it visited the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra in October. Humphrey was kind enough to share his thoughts with us on the festival by way of his correspondence to good friend Peter Lyssiotis, a poet and artist […]
AFCA Award for the Best Feature Film at #CaSFFA2016
One thing that became immediately clear to the jury members as we began to delve into the CaSFFA program was that this was to be a year of exemplary performances by women. Whether it was Aňa Geislerová trying to protect her daughter from folkloric frights in Opening Night film The Noonday Witch (Polednice), to Barbora […]
Voyeurism and The Cleaner
Voyeurism is a popular theme in film. That is presumably no accident since the mere act of sitting in a darkened theatre and watching people’s lives unfold in front of our eyes can often feel like a case of voyeurism in itself. Sometimes that is because any given film is so deeply rooted in honesty […]
If You Go into the Woods Tonight…
For the first time in our four year run, CaSFFA presents a series of unique new short films in If You Go into the Woods Tonight…. This program draws upon the concept of ‘the forest’ – a place quite often used, to great effect, throughout Czechoslovak film and literature. Within the shadows of immense pine trees, […]
Slovakia’s answer to Bill Cunningham?
Slovakia’s answer to Bill Cunningham! That may be how some see fit to describe Zuzana Mináčová, the heavily influential photographer whose story is the centre of the new documentary Through the Eyes of the Photographer (Očima Fotografky). That would be understandable, too, if all you knew of her career was the red carpet scene that […]
Costume Designer Theodor Pištěk
It feels strange to call Theodor Pištěk a costume designer, when in an interview for The Washington Post, back in 1985, he claimed, “I want not to do costume design – it takes time away from the paintings”. This was following the success of Miloš Forman’s period drama Amadeus (1984), which won Pištěk an Academy […]
Meet CaSFFA Juror Hayley Inch
Getting to know Hayley, and getting to know Czech and Slovak cinema I felt a little bit guilty initially on agreeing to be a CaSFFA jury member, as I was convinced that my poor viewing record on Czech, Slovak, and Czechoslovak cinema didn’t put in me in great stead to be a good judge on […]
Meet CaSFFA Juror Glenn Dunks
Like many of a certain generation, I began my film writing life on a blog while simultaneously working the sort of retail and hospitality jobs that you take when you haven’t a clue what you want to actually do with your life. Movies were – and still are in many ways – a respite, but […]
Meet CaSFFA Juror Tom Clift
In the five years that I’ve been fortunate enough to watch movies for a living, I’ve likewise been blessed with the opportunity to attend a number of international film festivals. I’ve felt Oscar buzz start to brew in Toronto. I’ve seen bold freshman films in Rotterdam. I’ve braved the subway crush in peak hour on […]
Out of the Shadows: The Noonday Witch
Horror festers within the shadows, we’re told, but what if it makes its way into the sunshine? In the myriad cultures she has long haunted, the folkloric figure of the noonday witch is a nightmare queen who runs by variations of the same name across borders: she is Poludnytsya in Ukrainian, Poludnitsa in Bulgarian, Poludnica […]
Guests at #CaSFFA2016
What’s a film festival without guests to liven things up? We’ve got a range of remarkable people coming in from outside of the core festival team to share their time, talents, energies, enthusiasm and expertise in order to enliven things no end at #CaSFFA2016! SHAUN TAN Originally from Perth, WA, Shaun Tan works as an artist […]
Welcome
Welcome, one and all, to the 4th Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia (CaSFFA), our biggest and boldest event yet, with its theme of “Text and Texture” encompassing not just the one expected art form (cinema); not just two (cinema and literature), but all those points where the cinematic and literary arts collide – all […]