VATERLAND – A HUNTING LOGBOOK / VATERLAND – LOVECKY DENÍK
CZECH REPUBLIC 2004
Director: David Jarab, 94 MIN

The story of a strange hunting-trip. In a remote, rather poor part of Czechia, a family arrives from Western Europe in their luxury-cars: The brothers Richard and Vilem Czadsky with their two wives, as well as their cousins Max and Leo. They want to take a look at a sprawling country-home that still belongs to their family but has fallen in disrepair. They have to figure out what to do with it. Their late father’s butler Willmer takes care of their needs, and soon the old, aristocratic atmosphere of days past has returned. One of the old traditions is the hunt for man-like beings called “skeletons” – only a few of them have survived in the mountains. According to one of their ancestor’s diary, one is only allowed to hunt them with old weapons passed along by other generations and according to strict rules.
VATERLAND is a film clearly in the tradition of surrealist cinema, with Eastern European role-models like Jan Svankmajer or Pavel Juracek and Western European archetypes like Luis Buñuel. The bizarre gets more and more into the foreground, like in the scene where the men capture a couple and measure it. VATERLAND mixes elements of the fantasy and crime-genres into a thriller that poses the questions: How do we deal with our past? And how do we deal with things strange to us?

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