Hana Blaha Šilarová • Producer, Frame Films
“Cinema reflects and mirrors our world”
- The Emerging Producer from Czech Republic discusses her approach to cinema and her future projects
An interview with Hana Blaha Šilarová, producer for Czech company Frame Films and selected for the 2023 Emerging Producers programme. Read her EP profile here.
Why do you produce documentaries? Do you see documentary cinema as an instrument of social and political change?
Hana Blaha Šilarová: I like to look at my work as a filmmaker from a more complex perspective and do not choose only documentary projects. I think cinema in general reflects and mirrors our world. I am more attracted to the story the director wants to tell, the form comes along. In this sense, I hope the films we make can bring some change that does not necessarily have to be only political or social.
Where do you find audiences for your films?
It depends on the film. From the development stage, I tend to have discussions with the directors about who our audiences are. We are offering our films to audiences at film festivals, in big screenings halls, online, on TV. For example, with Darkening, a VR animated film about living with depression and the hope for a normal life with this illness, we decided to attract audiences into art galleries (as the film is accompanied by a physical installation) and we are inviting school classes to come and attend our special 90 minute programme on mental health.
What films have you seen recently and would recommend watching?
I was recently once again amused and touched by The Most Beautiful Age by Jaroslav Papoušek. He was a collaborator of Miloš Forman and was part of the Czechoslovak New Wave in the 1960s. It shows great work with different forms, merging documentary and fiction approaches.
What projects do you have underway (including fiction films and other projects)?
Currently, we are in postproduction with the highly experimental film, Three Economic Units, by Andran Abramjan. This short film is on the borderline between animation and fiction, using new techniques of shooting. Andran and his colleague Jan Hofman used Kinect, a gaming device, to shoot most of the footage.
The rest of the projects I work on are in development, ranging from a documentary on gardening in big cities (Garden of Dreams by Marta Zveibil Hrubá) through an animated short for children about an unexpected friendship (The Molepire by Marek Čermák) to a historical TV series about a Czech resistance group during the World War II (Three Against Gestapo by Kateřina Doležalová, Marek Grajciar and Ondřej Moravec).
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EMERGING PRODUCERS is a leading promotional and educational project, which brings together talented European documentary film producers. The programme is organised and curated by the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.
Deadline for applications to the EMERGING PRODUCERS 2024 edition is 31 March 2023.
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