Somewhat surprising and very unfortunate for US audiences that nearly 2 years after winning best documentary at the SF International, no one’s picked this film up for cinema or dvd distribution, but it’s available from their own site. Czech Dream makes a highly instructional piece for pulling back the shabby curtains on mass media, advertising firms, and the hypermarketed every-Man in a way that reveals the sausage-making of manipulative campaigns and should spawn a new wave of pranking collision-course consumerisms. And here we get a taste of the east-block currently undergoing the high-speed colonization “upgrades” to shopping-mall democracy.

One of the makers, Filip Remunda (pic left) was on-hand to discuss the daring and well-aimed but rather precarious joke played upon a wide range of Czech citizens now on the EU “structural adjustment” ropes. He’s also in town working on a project that involves (documenting?) the music group Sabot, which involves some bay area exp-pats who some years ago set up Cesta, a unique cultural center in the Czech Republic in a town called Tabor. 2 concert dates include 2nite at Stork Club and 2morrow at the SF Eagle, see link above.

More on the ingenious “dream” deconstruction if we got time. XLT recommended: see this film ! Thanks ATA !

Continued…

What was really fascinating, and Gilbert from ATA also caught this one as a shining moment not to be missed, was when Filip answered a question about what surprised him the most in this prank being played out… and we will leave out what might be a bit of a spoiler, but he basically couldn’t believe that people will actually hold onto an image that has been created in the back of their heads even when the reality is right in front of their face. And this touches on something that Zizek talks about in The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema, that film ( and media ) has this capability to be more real than The Real… that is it certainly has less restraints to fulfill the Id and the Ego… And here in Czech Dream we see just how ruthless our fantasies might be played with in what Adam Curtis called “The Century Of The Self”. The title of his own ingenious socio-analysis of the 20th century consumer vortex and Sigmund Freud’s cousin Edward Bernays slipping thru the backdoor of our psychological make-up in order to crack out turnstile architectures for the predatory marketplace and the modern-day sucker, Bernays being the inventor of Public Relations.

And so what makes the punch of Czech Dream so sweet is that it begins to deliver the puppeteer-salesman’s (figure-)head on the platter by putting desire’s backdoor info into full prankster and consciousness-raising praxis. Surely there’s more fun to come from these filmmakers in the future ( holy-$%^#@! that was a 1st feature!), and others who take this approach as there cue.