I, OLGA HEPNAROVA by Tomás Weinreb, Petr Kazda @ CineStar Andel, Prague CZ
Já, Olga Hepnarová (Drama, Czech Republic). Press screening as part of the 2016 Febiofest Prague International Film Festival, 15/3/2016, 10:00
With the One World festival far behind me, it was time to turn my attention to Febiofest, and to narrative cinema, after watching plenty of documentaries in the past few days. So, my fest began with the bleak, neo-noir, black and white Czech drama about the last woman to be sentenced to death in the Czech Republic, an event that took place in 1975.
This film is a character study, and a close look at what led the woman to intentionally run over a group of people. The theme is of course terribly recent. Just yesterday, another terrorist attack took place in Brussels. The only difference between Hepnarova's act is that it is, by all means, an act of terrorism, but it is not easily categorized as such because it was done not for political or ethical motives, but as the culmination of a lifetime's cry for help. At first I was agnered at the way that the main character in this film is a lesbian, and behaves like a dangerous, sexually charged femme fatale, a most unfortunate, traditionalist plague in cinematic representation of lesbians. However, I have had time to digest this, and since the film was after all based on a true story, I am not so angry anymore.
What is interesting about my attending this screening is that it is linked to a screening I had attended days prior, of a Finnish documentary named White Rage illustrating a scholar's theory on the origins of such acts of violence and brutality, the result of childhood trauma, events of bullying and other such things. Seeing as I, Olga Hepnarova checks all of these aspects, it was like watching two very similar films illustrate the same concept, one in documentary form and the other in fiction form.