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I’M NOT EVERYTHING I WANT TO BE

JEŠTĚ NEJSEM, KÝM CHCI BÝT

By Klara TASOVSKA

SQUARE EYES - as SALES All rights, World

Documentary - Completed 2024

After the Soviet invasion of Prague, a young female photographer strives to break free from the constraints of Czechoslovak normalization and embarks on a wild journey towards freedom, capturing her experiences on thousands of subjective photographs.

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Berlinale - Berlin IFF 2024
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    • Year of production
    • 2024
    • Genres
    • Documentary
    • Countries
    • CZECH REPUBLIC, SLOVAKIA, AUSTRIA
    • Languages
    • CZECH
    • Duration
    • 90 mn
    • Director(s)
    • Klara TASOVSKA
    • Synopsis
    • Flashes of bright light. In the darkness, fragments of black-and-white images appear for a beat. An invitation to a big prestigious photography exhibition means that seventy-year-old Libuše Jarcovjáková has to turn on her photo scanner. She has been waiting for such an invitation for the last 50 years. All that time she’s been trying to actually be a photographer, but no one really cared. Now she has to choose photographs that represent her and her work. But what can she show the world? Who is she?
      The story of Libuše begins in normalisation-era Prague, when she sets off, with her camera on her neck, on a journey around islands of “freedom”. She heads off for a night shift in a printing house, to spit-and-sawdust pubs, among exotic Vietnamese, Cubans, Roma, into the night streets of the communist capital city. Nudity, sex, alcohol, but also boredom and the straitjacket of normalisation. Her personal journey of emancipation, search for her own sexual identity captured on thousands of analogue images, is interrupted by a murder. As the Czechoslovak police take an interest in her photographs from the semi-legal gay T-club, Libuše decides to enter into a fake marriage and moves to Berlin.
      The new world is full of obstacles. After a car accident, she ends up in a hospital. She uses her last bit of money to fly to Tokyo, where, with the help of a friend, she miraculously breaks through as a fa­shion photographer. But it’s not the life she wants to live. She returns to Berlin, and after the fall of the Iron Curtain, heads back to Prague. Meanwhile, she keeps a record of everyday struggle, identity exploration, corporeality, relationships, and emotions in her pics and journals. The evidence is tens of thousands of negatives, preserving the transformation of body and soul over decades. What is Libuše looking for beyond the mirror?
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