Czech Film Project (documentary) ★½

Despite its premise, Marek Novák and Mikuláš Novotný‘s reductive reflection on the state of Czech cinema offers little more than a self-satisfied echo chamber. Shot in a single hotel room during the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2024, it gathered around thirty Czech-based filmmakers and posed a deceptively broad question: “What makes Czech film Czech?” The surface-level musings, inspired by Wim Wenders’ Room 666, rarely move beyond nostalgia, self-promotion, or aesthetic generalizations. A minimalist single-camera setup, unbroken and unembellished, positions the film as an exercise in democratic filmmaking. Each speaker gets equal time in the same sterile space: a table, two armchairs, and a city window. This conceit quickly reveals its limitations. 

Visual uniformity breeds monotony, and the refusal to shape or challenge the responses results in a documentary essay more curatorial than critical. It lacks a thesis, a point of view, and meaningful editorial intervention. Paradoxically, the only significant observations come through lack, such as the near-total absence of diversity. Despite the film’s introspective mission, it includes almost no representation from marginalized communities within Czech society. The lineup is overwhelmingly white, male, and institutionally embedded. Czech-Vietnamese director Dužan Duong is a rare exception. However, at that time, he hadn’t even released his first feature, and had only made a few shorts beyond that. This speaks more to the difficulties faced by non-White filmmakers than his inclusion. 

The same goes for the few women like Jitka Rudolfová or Beata Parkanová who offer more thoughtful reflections. They, too, come from an academic bourgeois background, which seems the ultimate glass ceiling. Seemingly, underclass voices have no say in Czech Cinema. Comfortably positioned insiders dominate the conversation around it. The sole non-Czech participant, Cristina Groșan, lingers in the room like a living token in a sea of homogeneity. Tasked with defining “Czechness,” many participants default to references to the Czech New Wave. Forman, Menzel, or Papoušek become nostalgic name-drops: revered but rarely interrogated. What do those legacies mean today? How does Czech cinema engage with questions of race, gender, class, nationalism, or colonialism? 

The notion of Czech identity is repeatedly framed in nostalgic terms, and there is little critical engagement with how exclusionary those identity constructs can be. There are faint moments of honesty and humor. Some participants acknowledge the stagnation of Czech cinema, imply creative cowardice, and market-driven pressures of commercial comedy and “village cinema.” But these arguments are tainted with academic and intellectualist bias. Ironically, this very idea of “high” and “low” cinema could be part of the answer to the question of why Czech cinema is stagnating – and the lack of diversion another part. The filmmakers’ unwillingness to steer or challenge the discussion results in a passive airing of grievances within a very narrow cultural framework. 

By presenting these voices without much friction or depth, Novák and Novotný end up reinforcing the very complacency they pretend to question. As a document of Czech cinema in 2025, it is a missed opportunity. Not despite but exactly because of its shortcomings, the result feels indeed like a contemporary update to Wim Wender’s Room 666. Ambitious in concept but hollow in execution, it suffered from exactly the same issues. Cinema, Czech or global, is indeed much like the room where both projects take place: only a chosen few are allowed inside and the view from there is rather limited.