On the occasion of the annual CinEast film festival, Mudam presents a documentary film portrait of Jan Švankmajer, the world-renowned Czech filmmaker, exploring his playful affiliation with surrealism. A lively dialogue engages with the director’s principles, creative process and the ideas, themes and obsessions explored in his films.

ATHANOR – Alchemical Furnace / Alchymická pec
Czech Republic, Slovakia, 2020
Written and directed by Adam Oľha and Jan Daňhel
With: Jan Švankmajer
Duration: 117 min.
In Czech with English subtitles

Biography:

Jan Švankmajer (b. 1934, Prague) studied at the Institute of Industrial Arts and the Marionette Faculty of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. In the 1950s he started working as a theatre director, chiefly in association with the Theatre of Masks and the Black Theatre. He first experimented with film-making after becoming involved with the multimedia productions of Prague's Lanterna Magika Theatre. He began making short films in 1964, and continued working in the same medium for over twenty years, finally achieving his long-held ambition to make a feature film based on Lewis Carroll's ‘Alice in Wonderland’ entitled ‘Alice’ in 1988. He has also exhibited his drawings, collages and so-called 'tactile sculptures', many of which were produced in the mid-1970s, when he was temporarily banned from film-making by the Czech authorities. He has been an official member of the Prague Surrealist Group since 1969.