MR. ROMAN / Handa Gote Research & Development and Martin Ježek

Mr. Roman was born, grew up, and then became alone inside an apartment of concrete panels. All roughly between 1955-1981. This period recorded by his father with the "I'm doing just what I see on camera" method. And Roman? He just grinned. Fishing, motors, spas.

A performance on the life of Mr. Roman, a life that was recorded in a DIY way in 8 mm format. 8 film rolls showing the life of an unknown family became the film material used in the work on the piece “Ekran“. This homemade film is now being used as the central material this project named “Mr. Roman“. Dynamic editing offers an unusual visual angle on the collected material, which follows the protagonist Roman through about twenty years of his life, and which also gives us an insight into the social and family rituals and typical activities of the time. The filmed material covers a period from the early sixties up to the eighties. The projection is accompanied by live music played on pre-digital electrophonic instruments.The project was intended to be presented as an at-home event for a smaller group of visitors, where the people coming can also bring home-made snacks, generating a reminiscence of the at-home events of the 80s.

Mr. Roman stands for a second part of a loose trilogy of pieces not using computers or other machines based on software or including integrated circuits.
The project Mr. Roman was co-created with Martin Ježek who is concerned with the 8 mm film format in the long-term.

Handa Gote Research & Development
is an art group which alternates instrumentation of sound installation, non-verbal and dance theatre, live music, visual theatre and technologies. Their work is influenced by minimalism, eastern philosophy and the DO IT YOURSELF movement. It is a mixture of Czech craftsmanship, recycled objects and technologies and inspiration from the Japanese esthetic categories Mono no Aware, Wabi-sabi.

Martin Ježek
is one of our most important makers of formal and conceptual film. His work almost universally has an extremely formal stance: scores and concepts which define the appearance of a film work before it is realised. He often works on his films in a sleeping car travelling across Europe, in which he is employed as a conductor in the sleeping and reclining cars. Ježek, as one of the most radical presenters of structural documentaries, defines the theme and the circumstances of shooting and editing, so that afterwards he can realise the film brut without considering its actual likeness.

Premiere:
The Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival