28/12/2016 - Big-budget domestic projects by Petr Václav and Jan Hřebejk among those in latest supported batch

Garden Store by Jan Hřebejk

The Czech State Cinematography Fund has recently distributed 60 million crowns (roughly €2.2 million) to support six projects. A third of this went to Petr Václav’s next project, Il Boemo, a big-budget biopic mapping the career of Josef Mysliveček, a Prague-born composer and close friend of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Václav has been working on the project since 2010, and will start casting in January while the first clapperboard is set to be slammed at the beginning of 2018. Il Boemo is currently set to be a Czech, Italian, French and German co-production, with the majority of shooting taking place in Italy, and partially in the Czech Republic and Germany. The film is expected to hit theatres in 2019.

The second largest amount was awarded to another big-budget domestic project, family saga Garden Store, a prequel to Jan Hřebejk’s acclaimed Cosy Dens. Written by Petr Jarchovský and directed by Hřebejk, the Czech-Slovak-Polish co-produced triptych consists of Family Friend, a story about families awaiting the return of their imprisoned men and fathers in the 1940s, Deserter, which revolves around the turbulent years between 1947 and 1953 seen through the eyes of the owner of a luxury hair salon, and the final part Suitor, which looks at generational conflict in the late 1950s. Hřebejk has already finished shooting all three films, which will hit Czech cinemas in May, September and November respectively, while Garden Store will also be shown on television as a six-part mini-series.

Other projects to receive support include Bear with Us [+see also:
trailer
interview: Tomáš Pavlíček
film profile] by Tomáš Pavlíček, a family drama about a get-together of three generations of a family and their relations, Marek Najbrt’s Czech, Slovak and German co-produced fairy tale The Magic Quill, which takes an innovative approach to genre, the third feature by Slovakian filmmaker Mira Fornay, absurd drama Cook, F**k, Kill (read news), and the second feature by Jiří Mádl, On the Roof, which is about a Vietnamese minority living in the Czech Republic, and was originally about the Korean community in New York.