DocsBarcelona and the Barcelona International Women's Film Festival are co-organising a masterclass with Czech filmmaker Helena Třeštíková (Czech Republic, 1949) as part of the festival's tribute to her film career for this 26th edition.
Helena Třeštíková began her film career in the mid 70s and has since made more than 50 documentaries. Her filmmaking interests always revolve around human relationships and social issues, and her speciality is time-lapse documentaries in which she follows her characters through several decades of their lives. In this sense, Třeštíková's work raises relevant questions regarding the practice of documentary filmmaking, such as the boundaries between creator and work, the ethics underlying the relationships established between the filmmaker and her characters, and the work of editing in which new temporal relationships or meaning connections are created that transcend reality.
Helena Třeštíková has twice won the main competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (in 1998 with The Sweet Century and in 2015 with Mallory). In 2010, Katka won the Czech Lion and in 2008 René triumphed at the European Film Awards. In addition, Třeštíková co-founded the Film and Sociology Foundation (Nadace Film & Sociologie, 1994) and the Man And Time Foundation (Nadace človek en tiempo, 1994).
During this retrospective at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, three of her most celebrated films will be shown: 'Katka' (2010), 'Private Universe' (2012) and the recent 'René - The Prisoner of Freedom' (2021), which premiered at IDFA in Amsterdam.
For the masterclass, Helena Třeštíková has made an intimate and careful selection of sequences from her filmography that have most influenced her and that in some way have informed how she makes films. Through these sequences we will be able to discover her way of working and the challenges she has had to face when filming her characters during so many years of their lives. The session will be facilitated by Marga Almirall, content creator of Drac Màgic.
